The Law Society campaign to support solicitors, firms and the wider national recovery effort – the Return, Restart, and Recovery campaign – seeks to place solicitors within the wider context and identify the role our profession will play to support access to justice and drive our economy forward.

In the light of recent COVID-19 developments the view is that we should change the first R Return to ‘reset’. This will be reviewed as the situation develops. Full details of the campaign are here

·         See our submission on the Spending Review

Part of the 3Rs campaign is the comprehensive spending review which sets out departmental spending for the years ahead and is the biggest opportunity to influence government spending priorities for our justice system.

See our submission to the spending review here

·         The Governments winter economy plans

Recently the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak MP, published his Winter Economic Plan and gave a statement to the House of Commons.

The plan seeks to provide support for the economy in the wake of new government restrictions aimed at tackling the spread of coronavirus. The focus of the plan is to “nurture the recovery by protecting jobs.”

The Chancellor has announced:

• A new Jobs Support Scheme – the government will provide direct support for wages for people in work, aiming to keep people in work on shorter hours rather than for firms to be forced to make them redundant. The scheme will support viable jobs, and employees must work at least a third of their normal hours and be paid for that by their employer. The government and employer will then support the remaining two thirds of the pay they have lost. The scheme will “target support at firms who need it most”. It will be available for small and medium sized businesses, and for large businesses that can demonstrate that turnover has fallen in this period. The scheme will be open for all employers and will commence for 6 months from the beginning of November. A visual explanation of the scheme is available here.
• Support for self-employed – The Chancellor announced he will extend the self-employed grant on similar terms as the new jobs support scheme. There will be more time to pay for self-assessed income taxpayers, who can now extend their outstanding tax bill over 12 months from January
• Cashflow – The Chancellor announced additional steps to support businesses with cashflow:

• Bounce Back loans – Firstly, he noted that Bounce Back Loans have had significant take up. The government will enable firms to pay that back as they grow, over a longer period of time and with no impact on their credit rating.

• CBILS and other loan schemes – Secondly, they will change the terms of the other loan schemes. On the Coronavirus Business Intervention Loan Scheme (CBILS) the government will extend its guarantee for up to 10 years, making it easier for lenders. They will extend the deadline for the loan schemes to the end of 2020, and are commencing work on a successor loan scheme to start in January.

• Tax deferrals – The Chancellor noted that previous tax deferrals had supported many businesses. These were originally due to be due in March in one lump sum, but will now be able to spread over 11 payments and with no interest.

• Hospitality and tourism – The Chancellor also announced he will cancel the VAT increase due for the hospitality and tourism sectors until 31^st March 2021.

Further details on the announcements can be found here.

In addition to this statement, it has been widely reported that the Chancellor will no longer give a Budget this autumn.

Courts Update

Keeping members safe in court and prepared for potential lockdowns

With ongoing reports that the rate of COVID-19 infections continues to increase across England and Wales keeping our members safe remains one of our key priorities. In areas where there are local lockdowns, courts and tribunals continue to function as normal and we ask members to continue observing social distancing rules.

We also continue to have concerns that allowing lawyers to break quarantine to attend hearings will increase the risk of COVID-19 transmission and pose a significant danger to court users, including the most vulnerable. We’d like to thank all who contributed to this issue, which we put to government on your behalf. We’ve had confirmation from government that they expect everyone who uses and/or works in the courts and tribunals to observe quarantine unless explicitly required to attend court. Read more on this here

Additional Nightingale court sites announced
On 21 September the Lord Chancellor announced the locations of eight further Nightingale court sites that will begin to go live from Monday 28 September 2020. View our interactive map which shows the location of open, and proposed, Nightingale courts as well as the type of work being heard in these venues here