The Chancellor recently announced a massive bailout package to support small businesses and people during these unprecedented times. Everybody needs to keep their eyes and ears open as new announcements are being made virtually on a daily basis.
The package of measures to support business include the following:-
- a Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme – all employees that are laid off or would have been laid off because the Coronavirus, will be able to claim back 80% of payments to employees. The mechanism for reimbursing employees is not yet in place.
- deferring VAT and income Tax payments
- a Statutory Sick Pay relief package for SMEs
- a 12-month business rates holiday for all retail, hospitality, leisure and nursery businesses in England
- small business grant funding of £10,000 for all business in receipt of small business rate relief or rural rate relief – the grants are payable by the Local Authority there is nothing you can do until they contact you
- grant funding of £25,000 for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses with property with a rateable value between £15,000 and £51,000
- the Coronovirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme offering loans of up to £5 million for SMEs through the British Business Bank
- a new lending facility from the Bank of England to help support liquidity among larger firms, helping them bridge coronavirus disruption to their cash flows through loans
- the HMRC Time to Pay Scheme
The links below provide an at a glance summary of the main proposals and the contents of guidance notes for Covid-19 support for businesses and Covid-19 guidance for employees.
Obviously, we will do what we can to help during these difficult times and will provide the best advice we possibly can to each and every client.
As far as the business interruption loan scheme is concerned, we would recommend that you consider how much you are likely to need and over what period. As a rule of thumb calculation, you might wish to add up your monthly overheads and multiply that by the number of months of business interruption (perhaps a minimum of 4) to arrive at the loan figure you are likely to need. In the first instance, you need to contact your existing bankers.
Once again, please rest assured that we will do what we can to help.