The United Kingdom government announced a new set of financial grants to help hospitality, retail, and leisure businesses amid the latest lockdown.
The United Kingdom's non-essential firms were forced for closure
According to NME, Prime Minister Boris Johnson confirmed on January 4 that England would consider a new lockdown due to COVID-19 cases surge in numbers and hospital admissions. At midnight last night, Scotland announced a separate lockdown.
Due to lockdowns, all non-essential businesses have been forced for closure, while pubs and restaurants are only allowed to administer take out foods. The latest measures prompted the U.K. government to offer £9000 or about $12,000 to each establishment in hospitality, retail, and leisure in a bid to assist them during the newly announced lockdown. In England, the lockdown is expected to last until mid-February, while Scotland will be reviewed as January ends.
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Grants is an addition to two existing support measures
Aside from these grants, there are also business rates relief and furlough schemes extended until April ends. Nearly 600,000 businesses are presumed to benefit from the new grants.
Hospitality, retail, and leisure firms could claim one-off grants in addition to the existing support measures to get them through the next several months. According to Business of Fashion, Britain offered Tuesday a support package worth $6.2 billion for companies battling to recover with the third national lockdown.
The measure was imposed this week in solution with the new wave of COVID-19 cases in the country. Rishi Sunak, finance minister, said that the non-essential companies could claim grants of up to £9,000 to help them get through the coming months, an additional support measure to hundreds of billions of pounds of other support.
Late Monday, PM Johnson announced that the highly contagious new COVId-19 variant, which was first identified in Britain, is spreading fast, risking overwhelming National Health in just 21 days. The new lockdown urged people to work from home unless their field can't do so.
Meanwhile, all hospitality establishments and non-essential stores would remain close. All the organized indoors and outdoors sports are canceled except for the elite competitions.
In November, Sunak said the measures taken to help the economy through the COVID-19 pandemic would cost nearly £280 billion this financial year.
Roger Barker, director of policy at the Institute of Directors business group, said, "This new grant package is welcome, and will go some way to reassuring the worst affected businesses."
In the second quarter of 2020, Britain was the most severely affected of any Group of Seven economies when it imposed its first lockdown, with output decrease by almost 20%.
The Organization for Economic Development and Coordination estimated that by the end of this year, Britain's recovery would be the slowest of all of its member countries except for Argentina.
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