Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on the potential merits of enabling furloughed staff from charities to participate in fundraising activities for their organisations.

Under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, furloughed employees can take part in voluntary work, provided that volunteering tasks do not supply services or generate revenue for their employer or a company linked or associated to their employer. This would therefore prevent charity employees who are furloughed from volunteering for the organisation they are employed by. The core focus of the scheme is to help those who otherwise would have been made unemployed and provide support to businesses as quickly as possible.

The system has been carefully designed to encourage employees who have been furloughed to take up opportunities to support the delivery of essential services through volunteering, while avoiding the possibility of individual employees being put in a situation where they are doing their contracted work for little or no payment.