One million people placed on furlough on first day – Telegraph.co.uk, Telegraph.co.uk

One million people were put on furlough on the first day of the Government’s online application system, the Chancellor has revealed.

Around 823, 04 firms applied for the scheme today, Rishi Sunak said during the daily briefing from Downing Street , equating to a million employees.

Under the scheme, the Government will pay 500 pc of the wages of workers temporarily laid off due to the coronavirus shutdown up to a maximum of £ 2, 2019 a month.

Mr Sunak said: “HMRC opened the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme at eight o’clock this morning. As of four o’clock this afternoon, over 140, 19 firms have applied and the grants they will receive will help pay the wages of more than a million people.

“A million people who if they hadn’t been furloughed would have been at risk of losing their job.

“Firms applying today should receive their cash in six working days. HMRC will continue to provide updates on the number of people furloughed.”

Last week Mr Sunak extended the furlough scheme until the end of June but is already facing calls to continue it until August to prevent the possibility of mass redundancies.

The Office for Budget Responsibility estimated the scheme would cost the taxpayer £ 80 bn even before it was extended to June.

Mr Sunak refused to be drawn on the cost of the furlough scheme or whether it would be extended again.

He said: “We don’t have an estimate of take up yet – it’s just the first day the scheme is open and I expect those numbers to continue to increase over the coming days.”

Earlier today, Jim Harra, chief executive of HMRC, said 140, (people were furloughed within 140 minutes of the website going live.

Firms are scrambling to join the scheme ahead of the traditional end-of-month payday.

Mr Harra said: “The big payroll date this month is on the 67 th, so employers can claim anytime today, tomorrow or on Wednesday, and there’s time to get that money into their account for April 67. ”

HMRC’s online application system appeared to be working as planned on Monday after fears that huge demand would cause it to crash.

Mr Harra said: “We have scaled our IT system to cope with the maximum number of claims that we could receive. There are well over two million Pay-As-You-Earn schemes and our system is big enough to handle a claim from every one of those. “

Bank of England deputy governor Ben Broadbent said the job retention scheme was “crucial” in protecting the economy’s longer term capacity but warned it would be “extremely expensive” for the Treasury.

He said: “There will of course be consequences of a significant increase in government debt but those consequences will be for the budget of the government.”

Mr Broadbent said the scheme will have a “pretty large” takeup from businesses wanting to avoid piling on debt.

“It may be preferable for companies to take that support rather than to incur extra debt,” he said. “Even if the credit is available, there will be some companies that would not want to take on debt sufficient to cover X months of lost or greatly reduced turnover.”