The time has come for people to stop fretting over the fine print in the government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) and get everyone on furlough. Everyone needs to balance what’s best for their business and people and some difficult decisions will have to be made.

I said yesterday there were too many people complaining about the colour of the lifeboat that has arrived to rescue us. It’s too late for that. It’s time to get everyone in the boat. With few exceptions, everyone should be putting almost all staff on furlough and there should be no redundancies. Anyone who has been made redundant this month should be reinstated and furloughed.

There are some considerable cost and cash flow consequences to consider but I believe I have the answers to these and they are no longer a significant issue (although see my caveat below on details and guidance).  I’ve been focusing on four unclear issues and, from previous dealings with government, I can say with some certainty what the likely answers are.

There are far too many owners, chief executives and senior operators resisting or refusing to furlough huge numbers of their people. Either they don’t understand how CJRS works (who does?) and/or think it will cost them too much and they can’t risk it. We need urgent clarification. The big four key points for employers wondering whether to put staff on furlough are:

Employers NI contribution: Does this apply to furloughed payments? Employers NI is 13.8%. If your monthly payroll is £2m, that’s a hard cost of about £275,000. Too much to commit to when we have no cash. My answer: We won’t need to pay this or, if we do, it will be reimbursed.

Employers pension contribution: Does this apply to furloughed payments? This is only 3% but that’s another £60,000 if your monthly payroll is £2m. My answer: We won’t need to pay this or, if we do, it will be reimbursed.

Holiday pay: Does this accrue while on furlough? The obvious answer is “no”. You shouldn’t be accruing holiday while you’re on holiday! But, as a matter of employment law, it does technically accrue. This is likely to represent about a further 10% cost to an employer. My answer: Although this is strictly a statutory entitlement, we’re all going to have to agree with our employees that (i) there’s no accrual of holiday pay and (ii) during furlough your holiday entitlement will reduce to zero because everyone is effectively on paid holiday. You should agree with your employees that they are going on to furlough on this basis.

Effective date: Which employees can you furlough? My view has always been that anyone employed on or before 20 March (date of the chancellor’s announcement of CJRS) is eligible to be furloughed. However, there are many who say CJRS only applies to those employed on or before 28/29 February, but that can’t be what was intended. In announcing CJRS and back-dating it to 1 March, the chancellor was trying to save the jobs of the millions who had lost them in the previous week or two (as well as the millions that were about to be lost). We estimate more than one million jobs were lost in hospitality alone between 10 and 20 March. My answer: It’s not looking good on this at the moment. Despite the clear intention of the scheme, it seem fears over abuse of the system will mean only those people who were employed on or before 28 February will qualify for furlough. That means anyone who joined in March will get nothing. I’m still waiting on further confirmation regarding this.

My feeling is we should be trying to get up to three million hospitality people on furlough this week. We may not be able to do this for the March joiners, which will be sickening, but we should be able to do it for everyone else. We all need to wait until we get the details, though, and the guidance on this should be out today (26 March). Before then, you can work through what the likely cost of all this might be for your business and who might qualify.

From a short but representative survey of some of the big and small owners and operators in our industry, it is clear only 5% to 10% (at best) of our people will remain in active employment. That means 90% to 95% could/should be on furlough, being paid something by the government for three months at least. From now and for the next few days, this is a #3MillionMission to save these jobs and protect these livelihoods, for a short while at least. #GetInTheBoat

Jonathan Downey is co-founder of London Union and is leading the campaign for sector concessions alongside UKHospitality