Coronavirus Employees' Help

Furlough runs until 30 Sept – how it works and how much you can get

The furlough scheme, which launched last spring, is specifically designed to help employers who are struggling to pay their staff as a result of coronavirus – for example, where restrictions force a business to part or fully close, or where employees are unable to carry out their work or have no work to do. This is how the scheme works:

Rehired and furloughed in March or April? Your eligibility for furlough might've changed since May

For furlough claims relating to the period 1 May and onwards, employees need to have been on their employer's payroll on 2 March 2021 to be eligible.

This presents an issue if you were rehired by your old employer in March or April 2021. That's because while you might've been successfully furloughed at the time of your rehiring (for any furlough claims up until 30 April, employees had to have been on their employer's payroll on or before 30 October 2020), you might find that you're suddenly ineligible for furlough from 1 May – as for any claims relating to the period 1 May and onwards employees need to have been on their employer's payroll on 2 March 2021.

Currently furloughed? You can work part-time

Your employer can have you work for it on a part-time basis, while furloughing you for the remaining hours or weeks. Your employer will have to pay your wage for any hours that you are in work.

Here's how being on furlough for some hours but working your other hours happens in practice...

• There's no limit on the number of hours you can work. For example, if you work a 40-hour week and your employer wants to, it can get you to work 39 hours and then furlough you for the remaining hour. The amount of time you work each week can also vary over the month, with employers varying it week by week.
  
  
• When you are working, you should be paid your normal wage for those hours. For the hours you're not working, you'll be covered by furlough pay, so you'll get at least 80% of your normal wage. Let's run through an example of how work and furlough pay could interact:
  
  Let's assume you work a 40-hour week, and you earn £1,000 a month for that. On furlough, you don't work and you get £800 a month.
  
  Yet if you went back to work for 10 hours a week, that's a quarter of your normal working time, so you'd earn £250 a month for the work you do. Yet you're still furloughed for 30 hours a week, so you get three quarters of your monthly furlough pay – that's £600.
  
  Adding it up, you'd get a total of £850 a month working those 10 hours, compared with £800 on full furlough.

Can I work one hour on and one hour off?

Of course, for some customer-facing workers who are paid per client, such as hairdressers, the workplace restrictions imposed because of coronavirus might mean reduced customer footfall when you actually restart work.

This will likely make the transition back to work financially challenging for many of these workers, as for the hours you're physically at work you won't be able to claim furlough pay – you can't, for instance, claim furlough pay for three hours of work that you've 'lost' through being at work but having to make the workplace Covid-safe, rather than seeing clients.

A message from Martin to the up to three million EXCLUDED from support

Note. This section was written in 2020, but much of this section still stands.

Martin Lewis, founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, said: "When the Chancellor's financial support schemes first came out, they were rightly lauded for protecting millions of people's jobs and incomes in this unprecedented health and economic catastrophe. At the time, I said in one interview I'd give it an A-grade, but what'd really count is how they'd help those who'd fallen through the cracks.

"Yet whether it's new starter furlough or self-employed support, freelance PAYE, limited company directors, dental nurses, shielders whose firms won't furlough and many more – those cracks are now fissures, with up to three million people desperate, without help or support. And so that grade has degraded.

"All my attempts to be allocated a journalistic question at the Downing Street press conferences about this have been turned down, so thank you to Andrew Marr who raised it, in my name, with the Chancellor on the BBC's The Andrew Marr Show.

"Listening to it will not make many hopeful. And indeed if you're in this situation, while you can hope for the best, it's best to plan for the worst. There's a new group, Excluded UK, set up as a community interest company by three people to try and give a voice to those missing out. It's early days, but at least it means there's a voice being heard, aiming to raise awareness."

Andrew Marr discusses the excluded with Chancellor Rishi Sunak on 14 June 2020. Content shared courtesy of The Andrew Marr Show / BBC.