Thousands of furloughed Scottish workers could face redundancy at the end of the summer when chancellor Rishi Sunak is expected to cut back on the government support scheme.
The Chancellor will announce today that employers will have to make a larger contribution to the scheme which has kept 8.4 million workers and paid up to 80 per cent of their wages, to a maximum £2,500 a month, since the coronavirus crisis started.
He has previously pledged to extend the scheme for another three months to October
But Sunni is under pressure from Treasury officials to taper off support for the scheme as costs have reached £15 billion.
The future of a separate scheme to support self-employed workers who qualify a grant of 80 per cent of their average profits, up to £2,500, for three months is also uncertain.
It has cost almost £7 billion so far.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s independent economic forecaster, has forecast that the overall bill for the government’s jobs subsidy schemes could hit £80 billion, pushing the overall cost of fighting the coronavirus outbreak to more than £300 billion.
But employers have warned that a dramatic change to the scheme at the end of July will lead to tens of thousands of redundancies, particularly in the hospitality sector which has not traded at all since lockdown was announced.
The Institute of Directors said that a quarter of its members using the job retention scheme risked going bust if they were forced to make any contribution towards furloughed workers’ wages.
A cross-party group of 113 MPs, including the SNP, have written to Sunak warning him not to end the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS).
More than two million self-employed people have applied for the self-employment income support scheme.
The chancellor is due to make an announcement at the daily 5pm press briefing.
But asked about the furlough scheme, environment secretary, George Eustice said the Treasury could not subsidise people’s wages “indefinitely”.
He said: “Now I don’t know what Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, will say later in terms of self-employed and the furlough scheme for them, but I think there is a general overarching message here that we’ve had a very generous furlough scheme in place to help people through these extraordinary times and to ensure that businesses’ overheads could be covered.”
