The Chancellor announced his new scheme last week which will replace the furlough initiative, set to stop by the end of October. By November, Mr Sunak’s job support scheme will come into force and run for six months, he announced. Under the scheme, the Government will subsidise the pay of employees who are working fewer than normal hours due to lower demand, applying to staff who can work at least a third of their usual hours.
While employers will pay staff for the hours they do work, the Government and the employer will pay a third each of the hours not worked.
This means the Government now covers just 22 percent of employee wages up to the cap of £697.92.
Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK tells Express.co.uk that the glowing evaluations of Mr Sunak will soon turn to criticism because of the policy.
He said: “Rishi Sunak’s star is definitely over. His rising star, his moment of glory in August, is done.
“The Eat Out to Help Out scheme has clearly backfired, this will be enough to basically kill his chances of ever becoming Prime Minister.
“I also have absolutely no doubt this job support scheme will backfire on him too, we are going to see unemployment rise significantly without a continuation of the furlough scheme.”
Mr Sunak has received praise from some during the pandemic.
‘Good Morning Britain’ host Piers Morgan, who has been critical of the Government’s handling of the pandemic, tweeted last week: “I wish this guy (Mr Sunak) was Prime Minister.
“Smart, confident, authoritative, empathetic, realistic & with a great grasp of detail. He’s in a totally different league to Boris Johnson or any other Govt minister.”
READ MORE: Rishi Sunak pushing UK into ‘economic meltdown’
He continued: “I’m afraid I see millions more people being made unemployed between now and Christmas.
“I don’t think we’ll even get to our worst by Christmas, it will be worse in the new year because a lot of companies simply don’t have the financial means to get through this.
“The Government is saying it doesn’t want to support non-viable jobs – we have vast numbers of non-viable businesses in the UK because of what has happened.
“So, we are going to see businesses failing – hundreds of thousands of businesses failing.
“The Small and Medium Enterprise sector (SME) employs 16 million people – that’s more than half of people employed in the UK.
“The SME sector will be hit hardest, so if they suffer so many people will be out of work it is absurd.”
