Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme statistics: July 2020

This is the second release of Official Statistics on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) and provides analysis of claims made up until 30 June 2020.

Additional statistics on the CJRS will be published in future months. The release is classed as Experimental Statistics as the methodologies used to produce the statistics are still in their development phase. As a result, the figures are subject to revision (see strengths and limitations section for further details).

The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) was announced by the government on 20 March 2020 in order to support employers who have been unable to undertake their normal activities through the COVID-19 period. Under CJRS, employers are able to claim support from the period starting 1 March 2020, where employees have already been furloughed from that date. For the period covered by this release the scheme provides employers with financial support of up to 80% of salary, up to a maximum of £2,500 per month per employee, plus associated Employer National Insurance contributions and minimum automatic enrolment pension contributions. The scheme changed in some respects from 1 July 2020, however the changes are after the period covered by this release.

Further details on the CJRS are available in the background section.

Next release

The next release will be published on 21 August 2020.

Main points

The key points from this release covering CJRS claims to 30 June 2020 are:

• 9.4 million employments had been placed on furlough, an increase of 678,000 compared with claims made until the end of May
• 1.14 million employers had made at least one CJRS claim – this is an increase of 75,000 over claims made to the end of May
• the total claimed was £26.5 billion at the end of June, representing an additional £9.0 billion in support claimed since the end of May
• employees of small and micro-sized employers were more likely to have been furloughed than those working for medium-sized and large employers: 57% of employments at employers with 5 to 9 employees had been furloughed against just 19% at employers with 250 or more employees
• in the accommodation and food services sector has had the highest proportion of employers furloughing at least some staff (87%) and the highest proportion of total employments furloughed at 73%
• based on employees’ residential address, the proportion of employments furloughed ranges from 29% in the South East and East of England, and Wales to 32% in the West Midlands
• the local authority with the highest proportion of employments furloughed was South Lakeland at 40% and the lowest was Boston in Lincolnshire at 20%
• by age, employees aged 17 were most likely to be furloughed. 61% of employments with a female employee aged 17 were furloughed, the equivalent figure for males was 58%
• across the age bands and by gender, employments with male employees aged 41 to 49 were least likely to be furloughed (28%), while for females, employments where the employees were aged 41 to 57 were the least likely to be furloughed (23%)

About the data in this release

The data used in this release comprises the CJRS claims made up to 30 June 2020. Where possible, this data has been matched with other HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) data to present the following breakdowns of CJRS claims by:

• employer size
• sector of the economy
• geography

New breakdowns:

• sector of the economy by country and region
• age and gender

This is the second time this information has been released publicly and has been produced using data from both CJRS and HMRC’s Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI) system. Following user feedback, we have incorporated two new breakdowns into the release: sector of the economy within which furloughed employees work by country and region, along with the age and gender of employees covered by CJRS claims. Following this release, we would welcome any further feedback from users. This should be sent to CJRS[email protected]. User responses will then be taken into consideration when developing future releases.

For these statistics, an ‘employer’ is defined as a PAYE scheme, and ‘employments’ are defined according to the CJRS criteria; further detail on this assumption is set out in the background section of this release.

As with the June release whilst the situation is improved it has not been possible to match all CJRS claims data with other internal HMRC data to compute a complete picture for each of the statistics in this release. Where we have been unable to match the CJRS claims with other HMRC data, we have referred this as ‘unknown’ in the tables within this release. Improvements to the data completeness and methodology used since the June release have reduced the proportion of cases reported as ‘unknown’ since the previous release, The next release will revise figures in this document where appropriate.

Throughout the release we now report a CJRS take-up rate for both employers and employments, where appropriate. The take-up rate has been calculated through analysing PAYE RTI data, to estimate the eligible population of both employers and employments. An individual with employments with more than one employer will be counted once for each employment furloughed.

Rounding has been applied to the figures in this release on a consistent basis, therefore counts have been rounded to the nearest 100 and amounts have been rounded to the nearest million. These statistics include employers that have made use of CJRS to furlough staff. There may be other employers who have not made use of CJRS but have placed staff on furlough and continued paying their employees’ wages.

Employer Size

Claims made under the CJRS until 30 June 2020, have supported 9.4 million employments and 1.14 million employers had made at least one claim by this time. The final date for claiming for staff furloughed up until 30 June is 31 July. Where it has been possible to match CJRS data to Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI), we have estimated the size of each employer in terms of number of employees potentially eligible for CJRS support.

For this data, we have assumed that PAYE scheme is the equivalent to an employer. For some employers, this is not an exact one-to-one equivalent. For example, some organisations operate multiple payrolls for different groups of employees and in other situations, a group of companies may pool their payrolls together under one PAYE scheme. However, in our view PAYE schemes provides a reasonable proxy for employers for the purposes of this release. The employer size has been calculated based on an estimate of the number of employments eligible to be furloughed.

The key points to note from tables 1a and 1b are:

• there has been an increase of 678,000 employments furloughed under CJRS since our June publication and 75,000 additional employers placing at least one employment on furlough, who have not previously claimed
• 60% of employers had made a claim under CJRS and 31% of employments had been furloughed
• employers with 10 to 19 employees have the highest take-up rate, with 80% employers of this size furloughing at least one employee
• employees of small and micro-sized employers were more likely to have been furloughed than those working for medium-sized and large employers: 57% of employments at employers with 5 to 9 employees had been furloughed against just 19% at employers with 250 or more employees
• employers, with 250 or more employees have furloughed 3.2 million employments. However, this represents only a take-up rate of 19%
• while 305,000 employers with one employee have made claims valued up to £721 million through CJRS

Table 1a: CJRS claims by employer size – employer level

Employer size	Employers furloughing staff	Take-up rate	Total value of claims made (£ millions)
1	305,500	41%	721
2 to 4	422,200	64%	2,316
5 to 9	184,500	77%	2,457
10 to 19	107,100	80%	2,846
20 to 49	66,900	78%	3,675
50 to 99	21,900	76%	2,379
100 to 249	12,600	74%	2,656
250+	8,100	69%	9,314
unknown	14,100	–	87
Total	1,142,400	60%	26,450

Source: HMRC CJRS and PAYE Real Time Information data

Table 1b: CJRS claims by employer size – employment level

Employer size	Employments furloughed	Take-up rate
1	305,000	41%
2 to 4	933,000	55%
5 to 9	880,900	57%
10 to 19	955,000	53%
20 to 49	1,157,000	44%
50 to 99	738,100	37%
100 to 249	803,100	31%
250+	3,218,800	19%
unknown	383,000	–
Total	9,373,900	31%

Source: HMRC CJRS and PAYE Real Time Information data Note: the number of employments furloughed in the unknown size category is not directly comparable with the number of employers in the equivalent category in table 1a.

Sector

This section presents analysis of CJRS claims according to the primary economic sector of employers’ activity, the take-up rate is also reported in this table for both employments and employers. This is presented in tables 2a and 2b, below. Key points from these tables are:

• the accommodation and food services sector has seen 73% take-up rate in terms of employments, with over £4.1 billion claimed through CJRS. With 87% of employers in this sector furloughing at least one employment
• wholesale and retail employers have claimed £5.3 billion through CJRS, with an employment furloughed take-up rate of 40%
• arts, entertainment, recreation and other services, has seen 75% of employers in this sector furlough at least one employment – with a total of 443,000 employments furloughed in this sector with a take-up rate of 66%. Claiming in total £1.1 billion
• construction has seen over 752,000 employments furloughed or 59% of those eligible, with 75% of employers in this sector making use of the scheme

More details on this are available in the methodology section.

Table 2a: CJRS claims including take-up rates by sector (SIC 2007) – employer level

Sector	Employers furloughing	Take-up rate	Total value of claims made (£ millions)
Agriculture, forestry & fishing	9,400	28%	86
Mining, quarrying & utilities	600	52%	64
Manufacturing	73,700	74%	3,340
Energy Production	700	52%	64
Waste and Recycling	4,000	71%	143
Construction	171,400	75%	2,607
Wholesale and retail; repair of motor vehicles	176,100	73%	5,269
Transport & storage (inc postal)	42,000	58%	1,340
Accommodation & food services	109,800	87%	4,131
Information & communication	57,400	37%	728
Finance & insurance	14,200	41%	246
Property	28,100	61%	489
Professional, scientific & technical	147,200	47%	1,909
Business administration and support services	100,000	60%	2,312
Public administration & defence	500	6%	41
Education	23,800	62%	673
Health	53,500	54%	897
Arts, entertainment, recreation and other services	29,700	75%	1,138
Trade union, religious, political and repair	70,400	76%	795
Domestic employers	7,500	10%	25
Unknown and other	22,500	–	154
Total	1,142,400	60%	26,450

Source: HMRC CJRS and PAYE Real Time Information data and Inter-Departmental Business Register

Table 2b: CJRS claims including take-up rates by sector (SIC 2007) – employment level

Sector	Employments furloughed	Take-up rate
Agriculture, forestry & fishing	35,800	20%
Mining, quarrying & utilities	15,700	30%
Manufacturing	964,400	40%
Energy Production	19,600	15%
Waste and Recycling	41,000	23%
Construction	752,400	59%
Wholesale and retail; repair of motor vehicles	1,812,000	40%
Transport & storage (inc postal)	392,800	30%
Accommodation & food services	1,602,800	73%
Information & communication	217,100	17%
Finance & insurance	73,700	7%
Property	147,900	34%
Professional, scientific & technical	597,500	27%
Business administration and support services	822,300	30%
Public administration & defence	11,000	1%
Education	296,900	9%
Health	398,300	10%
Arts, entertainment, recreation and other services	443,000	66%
Trade union, religious, political and repair	304,800	53%
Domestic employers	9,300	7%
Unknown and other	415,800	–
Total	9,373,900	31%

Source: HMRC CJRS and PAYE Real Time Information data and Inter-Departmental Business Register

Geography – Countries and Regions

We also provide geographic breakdown of CJRS claims based on the residential address information that HMRC holds for employees. This does not directly translate to the employee’s usual place of work, or employer’s centre of operations which may be in a different region. For example, an employee who lives in Wales and normally commutes daily to work in Bristol would be included within the count for Wales, rather than for South West England.

Figure 1 shows the number of furloughed employments by each of the English regions, and the totals for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. For some employments it has not been possible so far to link the employment to the employees’ area of residence and these are included in the unknown category.

The key points from this figure are:

• London and the South East account for over 2.5 million of the furloughed employments
• While the East Midlands and West Midlands have over 1.4 million employments furloughed under CJRS
• Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland combined have over 1.3 million employments claimed for under CJRS

Figure 1: CJRS Furloughed employments by region and country

Change between chart and table

Region/Country	Employments furloughed
London	1,291,600
South East	1,216,600
North West	974,500
East	830,800
West Midlands	820,200
South West	771,400
Yorkshire And The Humber	711,700
East Midlands	654,600
North East	329,500
Northern Ireland	240,200
Scotland	736,500
Wales	378,400
Unknown	417,700

Source: HMRC CJRS and PAYE Real Time Information

Figure 2 shows the take-up rate of employments furloughed within each country and region using CJRS.

The key points to note from figure 2 are:

• The employment furloughed take-up rate ranges from 29% in the South East and East of England, and Wales to 32% in the West Midlands
• This shows a broad consistency in rates of furloughing across the countries and regions of the UK

Figure 2: Employment furlough take-up rate by Country and Region

Change between chart and table

Region/Country	Take-up
London	29.8%
South East	28.6%
North West	29.7%
East	28.7%
West Midlands	31.8%
South West	30.6%
Yorkshire And The Humber	29.6%
East Midlands	29.7%
North East	29.6%
Wales	28.9%
Scotland	29.8%
Northern Ireland	30.4%

The data for both figures 1 and 2 can be accessed from the spreadsheet accompanying this bulletin.

Geography – Local authorities and Parliamentary Constituencies

Accompanying this release is a separate file providing counts of the number of furloughed employments by Local Authority and UK Parliamentary Constituency based on each employee’s residential address. In line with the rest of the release we also report the CJRS take-up rate employments in each local authority and constituency that have been furloughed at least once during CJRS’s operation. In figures 3 and 4 we present the take-up rates for employments furloughed in maps for both the local authorities and UK Parliamentary Constituencies. With a darker shade of green indicating a higher take-up rate in both maps.

The key points to note here for local authorities are:

• South Lakeland has the highest employment take-up rate, with a rate of 40% of employments furloughed, followed by Eden at 39%, and Crawley, Pendle and Scarborough local authorities with take-up rates of 37%
• Boston in Lincolnshire was the local authority with the lowest proportion of employments furloughed at 20%
• Birmingham has the highest number of employments furloughed, with 147,800, followed by Leeds with 105,900 employments furloughed – the take-up rates in these local authority areas are 33% and 29% respectively
• In Scotland, Glasgow City has 88,300 employments furloughed – a take-up rate of 32% of employments, while the City of Edinburgh has an employment furlough take-up rate of 28%, with over 69,500 employments furloughed
• For Northern Ireland, Mid Ulster has the highest take-up rate with 35% of employments furloughed, while Belfast has a take-up rate of 28%, with over 41,500 employments furloughed

Figure 3: Employment furlough take-up rate by local authority

Source: HMRC CJRS and PAYE Real Time Information. Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2020

The key points to note here for UK Parliamentary Constituencies are:

• the Westmorland and Lonsdale constituency in the North West of England has the highest take-up rate, with 43% of employments furloughed at least once – this amounts to over 16,000 employees
• Dwyfor Meirionnydd constituency in Wales has the second highest take-up rate with almost 40% of eligible employments furloughed under CJRS
• the rate of furloughed employments was lowest in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency at 20%
• the West Ham and Tottenham constituencies have the highest number of employments furloughed, with 35,000 and 30,000 furloughed respectively – eight of the ten constituencies with the highest number of furloughed employments fall within the Greater London area
• the Mid Ulster constituency has the highest take-up rate in Northern Ireland with 37% of eligible employments furloughed, amounting to over 16,000 employees
• Glasgow East has the highest take-up rate in Scotland, with a take-up rate of 36% or 15,000 employments furloughed under CJRS

Figure 4: Employment furlough take-up rate by UK Parliamentary Constituency

Source: HMRC CJRS and PAYE Real Time Information. Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2020

These tables can be found in the accompanying spreadsheet available on the same page on GOV.UK.

Sector of the economy by country and region

The spreadsheet file accompanying this release presents analysis that additionally provides a sector breakdown of the figures for employments furloughed in each country and region. Moreover, the proportion of the workforce furloughed in each area and sector is shown. The analysis is based on where employees live rather than where they work.

The key points to note:

• in Northern Ireland 70% of eligible employments in Construction have been furloughed, while in Scotland 72% have been furloughed. This compares to 59% across the UK as a whole and 57% in England
• in the West Midlands 49% of employments in manufacturing have been furloughed while in the East Midlands and in Yorkshire and The Humber 40% have been furloughed – this compares to 36% in the North West and 40% across the whole of the UK
• in London 63% of employments in the arts, entertainment, recreation and other services sector have been furloughed – Wales and the South West had higher take-up rates in this sector at 73% and 68% respectively
• across all countries and regions of the UK more than 70% of employments in Accommodation and food services have been furloughed through CJRS

Demographics – Age and Gender breakdown

This section of the release describes the employments furloughed by employees’ age and gender. This breakdown is based on the most up-to-date demographic information that HMRC holds on the individuals for whom claims have been made. More information on reporting changes in personal details to HMRC can be found here.

The age of employees is calculated as at 1 March 2020. The key points to note from figure 5 are:

• employees aged 17 were most likely to be furloughed. 61% of employments with a female employee aged 17 were furloughed, the equivalent figure for males was 58%
• at age 22 and above, females were less likely to be furloughed than males – in part this reflects the sectors that men and women tend to work in, for example, relatively more women work in the education and health sectors which have experienced a relatively low level of furloughing
• across the age bands and by gender, employments with male employees aged 41 to 49 were least likely to be furloughed (28%), while for females, employments where the employees were aged 41 to 58 were the least likely to be furloughed (23%)
• employees aged in their 60s were a little more likely to be furloughed than those in their 40s and 50s
• in absolute terms more employments with male employees have been furloughed (4.8 million) than with employments with female employees (4.2 million)

Figure 5: Employment furlough take-up rate by age and gender

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2020

Source: HMRC CJRS and PAYE Real Time Information

Background

CJRS has been introduced by the government to support employers through the COVID-19 period, this has commonly been referred to as the furlough scheme. It works by providing grants to employers of up to a maximum 80% of salary to a maximum value of £2,500 per employee. While covering some of the cost employers pension contributions and the employer National Insurance Contributions.

The scheme is based around HMRC’s Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system. For an employer to qualify for the scheme they need to have created a PAYE scheme by 19 March 2020. In these statistics, an employer is defined as a PAYE scheme.

The rules for an employment to qualify to be covered by the scheme are set out in guidance, and two of the key rules are that the furloughed employee must have been employed on 19 March 2020 and the employer must have submitted a Real Time Information (RTI) submission to HMRC for the employee by this date. Further information on the qualifying criteria are available at the following internet location: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-for-wage-costs-through-the-coronavirus-job-retention-scheme.

Changes to the scheme from 1 July 2020

From 1 July 2020, employers have the flexibility to bring furloughed employees back to work part time. Additionally, employers have the flexibility to decide the hours and shift patterns of their employees – with the government continuing to pay 80% of salaries for the hours they do not work. When claiming the CJRS grant for furloughed hours, employers will need to report and claim for a minimum period of a week.

The scheme closed to new entrants from 30 June 2020. After this date, employers have only been able to furlough employees they furloughed for a full three-week period prior to 30 June 2020.

As a consequence of the closure of the scheme to additional employees and the minimum three-week furlough period that applied until the end of June, the final date that an employer could have furloughed an employee for the first time was 10 June 2020. Employers have until 31 July 2020 to make any claims in respect of the period to 30 June 2020.

Glossary

An employer is defined within this release as a Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Scheme. In some circumstances this does not map directly to what is commonly understood to be an employer. For example, some organisations operate multiple payrolls, and in other situations, a group of companies may pool their payrolls together under one PAYE scheme. However, in our view PAYE schemes provides a reasonable proxy for employers for the purposes of this release.

An employment is defined within this release as anyone who meets the scheme criteria set out within the published guidance. We have applied this definition in order to keep the presentation simple and the difficulty in separating out Office Holders (such as directors) from what are generally considered employees. Further information on the eligibility criteria is set out in the background section above.

Measuring the data

Data source and collection

The data for this release comes from HM Revenue and Customs’ CJRS claims. It covers the whole population rather than a sample of people or companies, and it will allow for more detailed estimates of the population.

The release is classed as Experimental Statistics as the methodologies used to produce the statistics are still in their development phase. As a result, the series are subject to revisions. Information about what the term Experimental Statistics means is published by the Office for National Statistics.

Additional data from HMRC’s Real Time Information (RTI) system has been matched with CJRS data in order to produce the statistics released here.

Coverage

This publication covers all employers and their employments that have made CJRS claims for support from the inception of the scheme up until 30 June 2020.

Upcoming changes

Future bulletins are planned to include additional statistics. The further analysis will be informed by user feedback. Please email CJRS[email protected]. If you would like to offer feedback on how the contents can be improved in the future.

Methodology

The figures for the total number of employments presented in this release have been calculated on a different basis to the figures that make up the breakdowns. Where an employer has submitted multiple claims for different periods, the maximum number of employments that each employer has claimed for is counted. Some employers may have furloughed different staff at different times. In this situation, the employer’s contribution to the overall total figure will be the maximum number of staff they furloughed at any one time – rather than the total number of distinct employees furloughed during the furlough scheme (not necessarily all at the same time).

These statistics count employments. Therefore, an employee with jobs at two employers will be counted twice if both jobs are furloughed.

The take-up figures and the breakdown by employer size are based on a list of employees employed on 19 March 2020 and included in PAYE Real Time Information submissions for the 2019 to 2020 tax year. Only employments in RTI submissions received by HMRC by 19 March 2020 are counted. Following the criteria for qualifying for the scheme, this is supplemented by a list of people who were employed on 28 February 2020 but who left their job before 19 March and who were later re-employed by the same employer.

In some circumstances HMRC holds incomplete information about employments, for example where a leaving date had not been submitted by employer. In this situation, an estimate of the probability that an individual was employed on the qualifying dates has been used. The assessment of whether a person was employed on the qualifying dates is based on the methodology used for the joint HMRC/ONS statistics release, Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information. For the latest release (June 2020), click here.

Employers making claims for 100 or more employees are required to submit the details of the employees furloughed in a spreadsheet-type file. While these claims have been processed from a customer service perspective, the processing of this information for these statistics has been complex and the processing of data on some employments has not been completed. This is a factor behind the unknown category in the tables. The completeness of this data has improved since the June release and we expect some further (smaller) improvements for future releases.

The geographical and demographic breakdowns of employments include all employees that employers have furloughed where it has been possible to link claim data on furloughed employments to classifying information (such as the employee’s age, gender and address). The linking has been performed using employees’ National Insurance numbers to data held within HMRC’s Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI) system. When the employer-submitted National Insurance numbers are not of sufficient quality to be matched with other HMRC data, the employments have been categorised as ‘unknown’.

The geographic breakdowns in the tables and maps use a postcode lookup file from Office for National Statistics (ONS) data to link UK postcodes to geographic areas. Where a geographic area is potentially disclosive, we have combined the figure for this area with an adjoining area. This applies to the Isles of Scilly (combined with Cornwall) and the City of London (combined with the City of Westminster).

Industrial sector information is based on the Interdepartmental Business Register (IDBR) produced by the ONS. Where PAYE schemes are absent from the IDBR, we have used sector information from Companies House, linking on employer name where possible. This provides Standard Industrial Classification codes (UK SIC 2007) for employers that have made a claim. Where we have unable to determine SIC codes, we have reported the sector as ‘unknown’.

For future releases we are planning on refining the methodology used in order to improve the statistics reported.

Strengths and limitations

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) grants pre-release access to official statistics publications, and in accordance with the HMRC policy, pre-release access has been granted to a number of people to enable the preparation of a ministerial briefing. Further details, including a list of those granted access, can be found on HMRC’s website.

Experimental Statistics status

The release is classed as Experimental Statistics as the methodologies used to produce the statistics are still in their development phase. This does not mean that the statistics are of low quality, but it does signify that the statistics are new and still being developed. As the methodologies are refined and improved, there may be revisions to these statistics.

Rather than waiting until the development work has been completed, the statistics are being published now to involve potential users in developing the statistics. We hope that this encourages users to provide us with their thoughts and suggestions of how useful the statistics are and what can be done to improve them. Comments can be sent by email to CJRS[email protected].

More information about what it means for Official Statistics to be classified as Experimental Statistics is available from the Office for Statistics Regulation.

Office for Statistics regulation review

These statistics have been produced quickly in response to developing world events. The Office for Statistics Regulation, on behalf of the UK Statistics Authority, has reviewed them against several key aspects of the Code of Practice for Statistics and regards them as consistent with the Code’s pillars of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value.

Strengths of the data

The data used in this release includes all claims made by employers up until 30 June 2020 and therefore covers the complete employer population that has made at least one CJRS claim to that date. As the basis for the CJRS is Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI), the whole population is covered. We have been able to match CJRS data to this source to provide the additional information presented in this release.

Revisions

The figures in this release incorporate data on claims received by HMRC during June. They also reflect improvements to the methodology used. In future iterations of this statistics release there will may be some further revisions reflecting improvements to the data processing and methodology.