Furlough scheme has been vital in supporting economy says Filey MP
The MP for Filey says the furlough scheme has been vital in supporting the economy.
The MP for Filey says the furlough scheme has been vital in supporting the economy.
After yesterday's Budget the government has now committed to spending a total of more than 80 billion pounds on it by the end of September.
But who does it benefit the most - employer or employee?
Kevin Hollinrake, who is also a businessman of 30 years, said:
"Both without question. If I can take you back to the recession in 2008, I've been in business for 30 years and our business then employed a couple of hundred people and it cost us half a million pounds to make people redundant, and we had to make two thirds of our workforce redundant.
"What furlough does effectively is the state pays for the wages for those employees which helps then the business to not having to make redundancies, and that business can get back on its feet really quickly once the recession ends.
"It's very expensive to make them redundant. You can't simply lay people off for an extended period of time, especially when you don't know when the crisis will end, so you make them redundant which costs a lot of money and a lot of time and those people in-and-out of jobs and on universal credit.
"It is a very good scheme, probably the best in the world. The office of budget responsibility was predicting there would be 10 percent of people who could work out of work by last July/August and actually even now, it's only around 5 percent so it really has been very, very effective.
"You can't run a national scheme to cater for every single case it just wouldn't be possible, so yes of course some people benefitted where they shouldn't have done but in general, this has had a tremendous effect in terms of preventing unemployment which means the economy can bounce back much more quickly."