The Chancellor has announced the Government’s ‘Plan for Jobs’, worth up to £30 billion. This plan will support people to find jobs, creating new jobs through investing in infrastructure and protecting jobs by helping the hard-hit sectors upon which many jobs depend.
This follows over £160 billion plan to protect jobs, incomes and businesses throughout the pandemic, and was one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world.
These measures announced include:
- A jobs retention bonus scheme that will reward and incentivise employers who successfully bring furlough staff back. Businesses that keep their employees on will receive a one off payment of £1,000 for every employee who was furloughed and is kept on continuously until January.
- Temporarily cutting VAT for the tourism and hospitality sectors. From 15 July, VAT will be cut from 20 per cent to 5 per cent until 12 January 2021. This could support 2 million businesses and protect 2.5 million jobs.
- Launching a new Eat Out to Help Out scheme giving people up to 50 per cent off meals out, encouraging them back into restaurants, cafes and pubs. Anyone who eats at a participating business, Monday to Wednesday for the month of August, can receive up to 50 per cent off food and non-alcoholic drinks, up to a value of £10 per person. Businesses can claim the money back from the government weekly, receiving funds within 5 working days.
- Temporarily scrapping stamp duty on all homes under £500,000 to boost the housing market. This means , 90 per cent of people getting on or moving up the property ladder will pay no stamp duty at all – equating to an average saving of £4,500.
- Upgrading the energy efficiency of homes across England through a new Green Homes Grant, saving people hundreds of pounds on their energy bills, while helping to meet our goal of Net Zero by 2050. We will provide £2 billion to allow people to apply for a voucher, to fund at least two-thirds of the cost of upgrading the energy performance of their homes – up to a maximum of £5,000. Low-income households will be eligible for up to 100 per cent of government funding, up to £10,000. This measure will also reduce energy bills by up to £300 a year and help to save carbon – equivalent to a flight from London to New York.
- Creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs for young people through a new £2 billion Kickstart Scheme, to give young people the best possible chance of getting a job. The scheme will directly pay businesses to create new, decent and high-quality jobs for any 16-24 year old at risk of long-term unemployment. Funding available for each job will cover 100 per cent of the National Minimum Wage for 25 hours a week, for six months in total, plus an admin fee – for a grant of around £6,500 per placement. There will be no cap on the number of places available, and our £2 billion will initially fund hundreds of thousands of new placements.
- Paying businesses £1,000 to take on Trainees, with triple the number of places there are now, to get young people ready for work. We will provide £111 million to triple the scale of Traineeships, which consist of work experience placements, training and work preparation for 16-24 year olds. We will also increase the eligibility of Traineeships to include young people qualified up to Level 3 (advanced – equivalent to 2 good A Level passes), up from Level 2 (intermediate – equivalent to achieving 5 GCSEs at 9-4) currently.
- Providing £2,000 to employers for each new apprentice they hire under the age of 25, helping more people into the workplace while developing key skills. In recognition of the value apprentices of any age can bring to our economic recovery, we will provide £2,000 to any employer in England who takes on an apprentice aged under 25, and £1,500 for any apprentice aged over 25.
- Giving young people who have just left school the skills they need to find work in high-value sectors, such as engineering, construction and social care. We will provide £101 million to help 18 and 19 year olds to take high value courses at Levels 2 and 3 where work opportunities are not available.
- Doubling the number of work coaches and boosting the DWP’s rapid response service to get people back on their feet and into work. We will double the number of Work Coaches through Job Centre Plus to 27,000; provide an additional £150 million into the Flexible Support Fund to remove barriers to work; and help DWP react quickly to large-scale redundancies by expanding the Rapid Response Service. We will also expand the Work and Health Programme to provide intensive support to people unemployed for at least three months; and launch a new scheme, modelling on the successful Work Programme, to support the long-term unemployed.
- Creating an Opportunity Guarantee so every young person has the chance of an apprenticeship or an in-work placement. As the Prime Minister announced last week we will provide an Opportunity Guarantee to give young people the skills and confidence they need to find the job that is right for them.
You can read more about this announcement here.
The full Treasury ‘Plan for Jobs’ is available here.
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