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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has made of the potential merits for (a) people who have worked in excess of 20 years and (b) workers more widely of revising the level of support offered under statutory redundancy in light of the covid-19 pandemic.

The Government recognises this is a challenging time both for employers and employees and that is why we introduced the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and Job Retention Bonus, to protect jobs and avoid redundancies. We hope that employers will use these schemes follow this lead and do everything they can to avoid making redundancies.

Where redundancies are unavoidable it is important that employees receive the payments they are entitled to. Employees with the necessary qualifying period will have access, as a minimum, to Statutory Redundancy Pay based on their age and length of employment.