Yahoo Finance Rishi Sunak must offer more to crippled businesses facing disaster from the new Covid lockdown or a jobs bloodbath is on its way
Listen carefully in London’s hushed streets and you can almost hear the sound of employers tearing their hair out.
Having been kept waiting all night for a support package to allow them to survive the new lockdown, Rishi Sunak’s Treasury totally failed to deliver.
No extension to VAT reductions.
No extension to business rates relief.
No future Eat Out To Help Out schemes that could save businesses and jobs.
To compensate for the cashflow disaster that weeks more of lockdown means, they get a few thousand pounds per property in compensation.
Not. Good. Enough.
The only result for restaurants, bars and other hospitality companies struggling to make ends meet will be this: closure and redundancies.
What they needed was a promise that taxes and rates would be cut, long term.
Restaurants pay around half their revenues in tax. Cut it and they quickly become sustainable, cash-generative businesses.
They proved that during their bumper summer months of tax help and Eat Out schemes.
If the government had extended the current reliefs through the rest of the year, they would have been able to go to their banks and pledge: “Look, we have a clear, proven, pathway out of this.”
Now, that’s a false promise.
Downing Street has served up another half-measure that achieves nothing.
A U-turn extending the reliefs must come fast, or tens of thousands more jobs will be gone by Easter.
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Businesses fear Covid lockdown disaster as Sunak aid package fails
