The Institute for Government (IFG) have released a report which claims that the current Job Support Scheme will undoubtedly waste tax payers’ money by continuing to support approximately one million inviable jobs.
The IFG has criticised the Chancellor for developing his policy in terms of one-size-fits-all, rather than tailoring the support scheme to better reflect what is going on in individual sectors.
The current job support scheme is supporting sectors which are relatively unaffected by Coronavirus restrictions, such as manufacturing, construction and professional services, suggesting that if they are still reliant on the JSS at this stage, they were probably unviable jobs to begin with.
These sectors make up approximately 1 million jobs.
The report makes note of 4 sectors in particular that made up half of employees still on furlough in mid-September: hospitality, arts and recreation, administrative and support services and aviation.
These sectors will likely require more support than the construction industry, but as it currently stands, every sector is entitled to the same access to the job support scheme.
The report says:
“The major obstacle to the government taking a more expansive approach to targeted business support would be identifying which sectors should be supported and which firms fall into which sectors. This may change over time, as restrictions are eased or tightened, and would differ across regions that face different public health restrictions.
“But these are not insurmountable problems. The government does have ways of identifying which firms are in which sectors: for example, it was able to apply a business rates holiday only to those businesses in retail, hospitality and nurseries that occupy business premises.”
