Rishi Sunak announces new emergency support package for business

This morning the Chancellor announced a new support package for businesses as the nation enters a third national lockdown.

Prior to today’s announcement, the help available to businesses included the furlough scheme, government backed loans, help with VAT and local authority grants. The furlough scheme and the Government backed loans, including Bounce Back Loans and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Support Scheme (CBILS) were both recently extended to the end of March 2021.

The Chancellor announced £4.6bn of new lockdown grants to support businesses and protect jobs during the third national lockdown. This includes one-off top up grants for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses and is worth up to £9,000 per individual property of each business. 

These one-off grants are available to closed businesses as follows:

• £4,000 up to a rateable value of £15,000 or under
• £6,000 up to a rateable value of £15,000 and £51,000
• £9,000 up to a rateable value of £51,000

Chancellor Rishi Sunak said:

"The new strain of the virus presents us all with a huge challenge - and whilst the vaccine is being rolled out, we have needed to tighten restrictions further.

Throughout the pandemic we’ve taken swift action to protect lives and livelihoods and today we’re announcing a further cash injection to support businesses and jobs until the Spring.

This will help businesses to get through the months ahead – and crucially it will help sustain jobs, so workers can be ready to return when they are able to reopen."

There is also a £594m discretionary fund also available to support other businesses impacted by the third lockdown that are not eligible for other grants.

In addition a £1.1bn discretionary grant has been made available to local authorities, the Local Restriction Support Grants are worth up to £3,000 per month. Businesses should apply to their local authority for these grants. 

The aim of these schemes is to help businesses survive the next lockdown that is expected to last at least seven weeks.

Those businesses that deferred the payment of their VAT for the period between 120 March and 20 June 2020 were required to pay this in full by 31 March 2021. However, HMRC is now offering a new VAT payment scheme, that allows businesses to pay their VAT bill in interest free instalments of between two and 11 payments. Businesses must opt into the scheme by end March 2021 and pay their VAT bill in full by March 2022.

Businesses can read more about the support available on the government website.