Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he made of the effect on the viability of the early years sector of his decision to place entitlement restrictions on early years education and childcare settings under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme; and if he will make it his policy to remove those restrictions.

HM Revenue & Customs’ guidance on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) has always been clear that “where employers receive public funding for staff costs, and that funding is continuing, we expect employers to use that money to continue to pay staff in the usual fashion – and correspondingly not furlough them”.

The guidance published by the Department for Education on 17 April confirms that early years providers remain eligible for the CJRS while continuing to receive early entitlement funding via local authorities. This guidance sets out that early years providers can access the CJRS to cover up to the proportion of their pay bill which could be considered to have been paid for from their private income.

This is a complex situation involving schemes which must be fair and work for all sectors. This approach is vital to support providers whilst ensuring that staff are not furloughed if staff costs are paid for by public sector funding.

Further information is available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-early-years-and-childcare-closures and https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-for-wage-costs-through-the-coronavirus-job-retention-scheme.