British finance minister Rishi Sunak offered fresh help to employers hit by the coronavirus shutdown on Friday (May 29), announcing that future contributions they must make to the government's costly wage subsidy scheme will be phased in slowly.
UK helps employers with slow phase-in of job shield costs
In August, companies will only have to make pension and social security payments for the workers they have temporarily laid off while the government will continue to pay 80% of their wages.
Employers would then be asked to pay 10% of the wage costs in September and 20% in October, reducing some of the huge burden on the public finances but a lighter requirement than reported by media before the announcement.
Sunak also brought forward to July 1 the introduction of part-time work under the program - a demand of businesses seeking to build up their operations gradually after the lockdown - and he extended another multi-billion-pound income support scheme for self-employed workers.