Overview

This edition of the Financial Impact Tracker looked at the effectiveness of the pandemic safety nets the government introduced.

The Government announced in late March of 2020 that they would provide a package of assistance to protect the livelihoods of those whose earned incomes had been directly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. This included two schemes: the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS, also known as the furlough scheme) to support the jobs of people who would otherwise be unable to work because of the lockdown rules, and the Self-employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) to provide financial support in the form of a grant to eligible self-employed people whose earnings had fallen as a direct result of the lockdown rules.

This report looks at how well these schemes have protected households that have suffered a loss of earned income as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on data from a regular tracker survey monitoring the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on household finances.