Flexible Furlough - What you need to know

You can start bringing your furloughed employees back to work part time from 1st July 2020.

Following on from our previous email about changes to furlough from July to October 2020 – here is a recap and some more information.

From August, the grant will change as follows:

July – the government will continue to pay 80% of wages capped at £2,500 as well as Employers National Insurance and Pension contributions
August – The government will continue to pay 80% of wages capped at £2,500 BUT Employers National Insurance and Pension contributions will be paid by the employer
September – The government will pay 70% of wages capped at £2,187.50 – employers will pay the additional 10% to make this up to 80% along with ER NIC and Pension contributions
October – the government will pay 60% of wages capped at £1,875 – employers will pay the additional 20% to top this up to 80% along with ER NIC and pension contributions

Remember that if you are a small employer the employer NIC bills will still be covered by your Employment Allowance.

From 1 July 2020 employers can part-furlough their employees, so that they can start making the right decisions to get their business back up and running.
Employers can bring furloughed employees back to work for any amount of time and any shift pattern, while still being able to claim the furlough grant for the hours not worked.
Employers can claim the furlough grant for the hours your employees don’t work, compared to the hours they would’ve normally worked in that period
Employers can continue to choose to top up employee wages above the 80% total and £2,500 cap for the hours not worked, at their own expense
You can still keep employees on full furlough if you need to
For payroll periods on or after 1 July, the maximum employees you can claim for can’t be higher than the maximum you’ve previously claimed for.
The first time you can claim for July furloughed days is 1 July, you can’t claim for periods in July before this date

You no longer need to keep an employee furloughed for 3 weeks
You can set their work hours and shifts so that they work when you have work for them to do
They can be furloughed for part of the week and work part of the same week

This is going to be complicated so we are going to need your help to keep very clear records of each employee and the days they have worked or are furloughed. We will be asking for this towards the end of July so please be very clear with your answers so we can accurately calculate your CJRS claims for each month and get the claims in promptly so you receive the funds quickly.
We will be asking you for a list of Part furloughed employees in the middle of July.
We will be calculating this on a day rate basis, if you are intending to furlough employees for part days/hours then there will be an additional charge for us to calculate this for you. This charge will be at £25 per employee per claim.

As always we are here to help, so please do shout if you have any specific queries.