NEW! One-off Top Up Grants

·        Top up grants, worth up to £9,000 per property to help businesses in the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors have been announced.

·        This is for businesses forced to close and will be allocated based on the property’s rateable value.

·        If your business property has a rateable value of £15k or under, your grant will be £4,000.

·        For business properties with a rateable value from £15k-£51k, your grant will be £6,000.

·        For business properties with a rateable value of £51k or over, your grant will be £9,000.

·        As soon as we hear what the process is, we’ll let you know.

Other NEW Discretionary Grants

·        A £594m discretionary fund is also being made available to support other impacted businesses.

·        This fund will be distributed by local authorities to support businesses not eligible for the top-up grants, that maybe affected by Covid restrictions.

·        This £594m is in addition to £1.1 billion further discretionary grant funding for Local Authorities, Local Restriction Support Grants worth up to £3,000 a month.

·        As soon as we hear what the process is, we’ll let you know.

Extended Furlough (CJRS) scheme

·        Furloughed employees will receive 80% of their current salary for hours not worked, up to a maximum of £2,500 until 30 April 2021.

·        As an employer, you’re only required to cover National Insurance and employer pension contributions.

·        To be eligible, employees must have been on your PAYE payroll on 30 October 2020. You must have a real time information (RTI) submission to HMRC notifying payment for that employee has been made on or before 30th October.

·        Employees can be on any type of contract and you can also choose to top up employee wages if you wish.

·        You will need to agree full furlough or flexible furlough arrangements with employees in accordance with employment law and their contracts of employment.

Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) – Third Grant

·        The third grant covered 80% of your self-employed average trading profits for November, December and January, up to a maximum of £7,500.

·        If you haven’t already applied for this, more information can be found here and the deadline is 29 January.

·        We’re waiting to hear details whether this scheme will be extended. Watch out for further updates.

·        This grant is taxable income and also subject to National Insurance contributions.

Covid VAT Deferral Payment Scheme

·        Are you going to have difficulty paying any VAT payments that you deferred from 20 March and 30 June 2020 by the 31st March this year?

·        If so, and you meet the specified criteria you can opt into a scheme to allow you spread the payments over smaller, interest free, instalments from 2 to 11 equal monthly payments until the end of March 2022.

·        This must be done through your Government Gateway before 31st March 2021, and it will be available early this month.

We’ll keep you up to date with any new Covid support measures and as always, if you have worries, please ring us.

We’re working remotely, but phones will be diverted and you’ll always be able to speak to one of us.

Many thanks,

The Kaizen Team

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