Orange Genie are committed to providing support to our contractors, employees and recruitment agency partners at all times. We are very aware of the financial concern our contractors are facing due to clients terminating assignments because of the coronavirus shutdown.

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The Government has now released new details about the Covid-19 Job Retention Scheme. The cut-off date has changed, from 28^th February to the 19^th March, and the qualifying conditions clarified to say employees must have been included on an RTI submission sent to HMRC. Effectively this means we can potentially furlough employees who were paid by us at least once on or before 19^th March 2020.

We are still awaiting clarification regarding how payments for furloughed umbrella employees should be calculated and we continue to join other stakeholders and industry leaders in lobbying Government for the answers we need. If you haven’t already, please help us by contacting your MP.

The most important question we need an answer to is about whether umbrella employees can be paid 80% of their average earnings, or just 80% of national minimum wage. Until we have clarity on this issue, we will make payments based on 80% of National Minimum Wage.

We continue to work with our agency partners to compile a list of employees whose assignments cannot continue because of COVID-19, so we can move to furlough qualifying employees as soon as possible.

Our systems have been updated to enable us to make payments to furloughed employees as soon as we receive the funds.

If you have questions of if we can help in any way, please call our expert team on 01296 468 483 or email info@orangegenie.com.