CJRS grants can be claimed for contractual notice periods and not just statutory notice

On 17 July, HMRC updated its guidance: Check which employees you can put on furlough to use the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme to make it clear under the heading ‘If you’ve made your employees redundant’ that employers can continue to claim for a furloughed employee who is serving out a statutory or contractual notice period. A previous change on 10 July which stated that a CJRS grant may be used to pay an employee during their ‘statutory notice period’.  That created uncertainty as to whether a CJRS grant could be used to pay an employee working out the whole of a contractual notice period which provided more than the statutory minimum. The 17 July update now removes that doubt. The rule within the redundancy provisions that CJRS grants cannot be used to substitute redundancy payments remains.