Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether he plans to allow access to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme for businesses where HMRC had not received the necessary Real Time Information submissions through no fault of the businesses; and what steps he is taking to put in place an appeals system to deal with such cases.

Employees furloughed under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) must have been on their employer’s PAYE payroll on or before 19 March 2020 and HMRC must have received an RTI (Real Time Information) submission notifying payment in respect of that employee on or before 19 March 2020.

The Government set up the CJRS to operate at significant scale and with limited manual intervention. The eligibility requirements are designed to ensure as many people as possible are included in the scheme while allowing HMRC to verify claims using RTI data, mitigating the risk of fraud. Processing claims for the CJRS in cases where HMRC did not have RTI data would significantly slow down the system and increase the risk of fraud.