Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether his Department has plans to reimburse businesses that brought back employees from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) on the basis of receiving the £1,000 per employee Job Retention Bonus (JRB) but that subsequently did not benefit from the JRB nor the extension of the CJRS.

The purpose of the Job Retention Bonus (JRB) was to encourage employers to keep people in work until the end of January 2021. This purpose was instead fulfilled by the extension of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) to March, April, and subsequently the end of September 2021.

That is why the Chancellor announced in November 2020 that the JRB was not going to be paid in February 2021. Instead, employers have had access to an extra eight months of support through the CJRS, which has been available to more employers and more employees than the JRB. Furthermore, the Government extended the cut-off date for which employers had to have submitted a Pay-As-You-Earn Real Time Information submission for employees from 20 March 2020 to 30 October 2020, and subsequently to 2 March 2021, to ensure that additional employees could be eligible for the CJRS.

As set out in the Plan for Jobs Progress Update, published on 13 September 2021, the economy now is in a stronger position than it was last autumn, and the labour market is in a stronger position too.

The latest data show that the Government’s Plan for Jobs is working across all parts of the UK, with just 1.3 million people on furlough on 31 August 2021, and online job vacancy levels 35 per cent above February 2020 levels. Furthermore, at the start of the crisis, it was feared that unemployment would reach twelve per cent or even higher. The figure is now less than half of that – meaning almost two million fewer people out of work than had been feared – while the headline unemployment rate of 4.6 per cent has now fallen for seven consecutive months. The ONS has also found that of all workers who had ever been furloughed, more than nine in ten were still in work in the three months to June 2021. This is a similar proportion as for workers who had never been furloughed, meaning that there was no statistically significant difference in employment rates between those furloughed and who had never been furloughed.

We continue to maintain our focus on those still impacted by the pandemic, with targeted support for businesses, as well as getting people back into work.