Early on Saturday morning, following a fast and furious Twitter Q&A session with Chancellor Rishi Sunak on Friday (more on that later), HMRC issued some further guidance on the new Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.
As set out in our previous two alerts on this topic, the Scheme will take retrospective effect from 1 March 2020 and will be available until 1 June 2020 at the earliest. The Chancellor has promised to extend it if necessary. Employers would be unwise to assume that it will definitely be extended, as the cost to the Treasury is obviously eye-watering and “necessary” is always a potentially elastic concept.
