Change the Furlough Support Scheme to include new hires after 28th February.

The government have released the furlough worker support scheme, but it disadvantages and discriminated against those who have just changed jobs or are due to start a new job in the very near future. This needs to be changed to be inclusive.

The scheme needs to be changed to include anybody starting a job until 30th April to allow for the majority of workers in notice periods to be able to be supported with this scheme.

The government announced in April that it would extend the cut-off date for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) to 19 March. This allowed employees whose payroll information was notified to HMRC by 19th March to be included. Over 200,000 employees who started a job in March benefitted as a result of this change.

The extension of the cut-off date allowed as many people as possible to be eligible for the scheme by going right up to the day before the announcement. There are currently no plans to extend the cut-off date beyond 19 March. The CJRS has had to be set up to operate at significant scale and with limited manual intervention. Extending the cut-off date further would significantly increase the risk of abuse because claims could not be confidently verified against the risk of fraud using the data after this point, when the scheme became public.

HM Treasury