Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps her Department is taking to support people seeking to retrieve financial earnings from (a) Thomas Cook and (b) other organisations that have gone into compulsory liquidation.

In an insolvent situation, the Government steps in to offer a level of protection to employees who would otherwise receive nothing from their insolvent employer. Payments are made by the Insolvency Service’s Redundancy Payments Service within certain statutory limits.

a) A specialist team was set up to process the high volume of redundancy claims from former Thomas Cook employees to ensure payments were received as quickly as possible.

b) Where claims are received from former employees of companies in compulsory liquidation, the Redundancy Payments Service pays on average within 14 days of receipt of information from the employee.