Billions of pounds have been given in grants to both employees and now self employed people to help with the Covid-19 crisis.  However, for many small companies, company directors of limited companies currently fall through the cracks and are not eligible to any grants, leaving them with little or no help during this crisis.  

Typically, many owner managed companies have directors which receive pay via the PAYE system and/or dividends. 

According to the gov.uk website on 26th March 2020:

"If you’re a director of your own company and paid through PAYE you may be able to get support using the Job Retention Scheme." (CJRS).

Unfortunately, the rules of the Job Retention Scheme are quite clear that in order to be eligible for the scheme, the "employee" must be furloughed.

There are two specific areas of concern: 

1. In order to be eligible for the scheme, the "employee" or in this case the director must be "furloughed" and therefore needs to be non-active.  A company director will undoubtedly still need to continue to manage the business in some way and so they will fall short of this CJRS requirement.  
2. Directors will often take a low, or no salary from the business and will instead take out dividends to make or top up their salary.   This means that a large portion (or all) will not be covered by the CJRS scheme. 

The request here is to extend the CJRS so that it correctly includes company directors and will allow it to fairly compensate company directors as it does with employees.  The proposed exception for directors is as follows:

1. Any company director using this scheme is not required to be non-active.

The current lack of support for company directors for small companies could result in many start up business or small limited companies unfairly closing due to no fault of their own.  This small change and exception to the existing policy will be a lifeline for many company directors which have small companies and are not eligible for any other grants.