Find coronavirus financial support for your business here.
Coronavirus (COVID‑19) support is available to employers and the self-employed, including sole traders and limited company directors. You may be eligible for loans, tax relief and cash grants, whether your business is open or closed.
Self-Employment Income Support Scheme
If you're self-employed or a member of a partnership and have been impacted by coronavirus (COVID-19) find out if you can use this scheme to claim a grant. Find more here.
Coronavirus (COVID-19): what to do if you’re employed and cannot work
Find more here.
HOSPITALITY OMICRON SUPPORT FROM GOVERNMENT
Due to the current, specific impact on the hospitality and leisure industry, the Government announced £1 billion of targeted financial grant support for the industry to protect jobs and businesses through cash grants of up to £6,000. Given the uncertain situation, we have deliberately erred on the side of generosity to accommodate all eventualities over this uncertain period.
We are providing one-off grants of up to £6,000 for eligible businesses in the hospitality and leisure sectors, depending on rateable value:
- Businesses with a rateable value of £51,000 or above: £6,000
- Businesses with a rateable value between £15,000 and £51,000: £4,000
- Businesses with a rateable value of £15,000 or below: £2,666
We are also providing over £100 million new discretionary funding to local authorities to support other impacted businesses. This is on top of the approximate £250 million of Additional Restrictions Grant (ARG) yet to be disbursed to businesses, with 3 out of 4 local authorities having up to 40 per cent of their allocation remaining. The Business Secretary has written to those local authorities which have more than 5 per cent instructing them to disburse their remaining funding.
We are reintroducing the Statutory Sick Pay Rebate Scheme to help businesses cover employees who fall ill. As called for by the Federation of Small Businesses, this will help small and medium-sized businesses cover the cost of coronavirus-related sickness absences. The scheme means employers can apply for a cash rebate from the government which covers the cost of SSP for up to two weeks per employee.
We are making available an additional £30 million to support theatres, museums and other vital cultural institutions through the Culture Recovery Fund.
This builds on our EXISTING package of support that is already in place to protect jobs and businesses:
- Reduced rate of VAT for tourism and hospitality. To support the 150,000 businesses and 2.4 million jobs in the tourism and hospitality sector, the government extended the reduced 5 per cent rate of VAT from 31 March 2021 to 30 September 2021. To help businesses manage the transition back to the full rate, a reduced rate of 12.5 per cent currently applies until 31 March 2022 – a tax cut worth over £8 billion.
- Significant business rates relief to support fixed costs. Ninety per cent of businesses in the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors currently benefit from 75 per cent relief until March 2022 – part of a £16 billion package of support from the beginning of the pandemic. Then from next year, as announced at Autumn Budget, businesses will benefit from a 50 per cent discount on their bills, up to a maximum of £110,000 per business. Taken together with Small Business Rates Relief, that’s a business tax cut worth £7 billion for over 700,000 eligible businesses, the biggest business rates tax cut in 30 years. We are also freezing all rates next year, and cancelling next year’s planned increase in the business rates multiplier – a tax cut itself worth £4.6 billion.
- Additionally, following passage of the relevant legislation, the government has issued guidance for the £1.5 billion Additional Relief Fund, allowing local authorities to provide financial support for businesses not benefitting from existing reliefs, such as breweries and wholesalers. The £1.5 billion has already been allocated to local authorities, and the DLUHC Secretary of State is writing to them today to impress the need for the money to be distributed as soon as possible.
- Government-guaranteed Recovery Loans. Businesses can access new Recovery Loans until June 2022, providing a 70 per cent government guarantee to lenders so they can continue to support businesses as they recover.
- Bounce Back Loan repayment facility. To help ease cashflow pressures, borrowers of Bounce Back Loans have the option to benefit from Pay As You Grow: 6-month repayment holidays, 6-month interest only periods, or extension of their loan to 10 years, which almost halves the monthly payment. Only 26 per cent of borrowers have used any Pay As You Grow option, and only 12 per cent have used the 6-month repayment holiday.
- Time To Pay facility for hospitality. HMRC stand ready to support any business impacted by the coronavirus pandemic through its Time to Pay arrangement, and we have asked them to offer businesses in the hospitality and leisure sectors in particular the option of a short delay, and payment in instalments, on a case-by-case basis, as part of this.
- Support for the aviation and travel sectors. We have supported the sector with over £12 billion since the beginning of the pandemic, through loan guarantees, support for exporters, and the Covid-19 Corporate Finance Facility. In addition, at Autumn Budget we extended the Airport & Ground Operations Support Scheme (AGOSS) for a further six months until the end of March 2022. This provides up to £4 million for every airport in England, effectively covering the business rates bills for most of them.
- Thanks to our actions, hospitality businesses are entering this period in a reasonably decent position:
- Businesses have more cash in the bank than before the pandemic. Net cash deposits have increased in businesses of all sizes and in all sectors by £130 billion since the start of the pandemic – that’s a 230 per cent increase. For all hospitality businesses, net cash deposits have risen by £7 billion (40 per cent), while small and medium-sized businesses in hospitality have seen their deposits rise by £2 billion (79 per cent).
- We are seeing fewer insolvencies now than before the pandemic. Monthly insolvencies across all sectors have been running 25 per cent below the levels pre-pandemic in 2019. In hospitality specifically, insolvencies are also running 25 per cent lower than they were before the pandemic.
- Trading conditions for hospitality have improved significantly over the past six months. ONS data shows hospitality output broadly recovered to pre-pandemic levels over the Autumn. Similarly, employment in the hospitality sector in November 2021 was broadly back to 2019 levels, and OpenTable bookings between May and the end of November were 27 per cent higher than pre-pandemic levels on average.