Stephen Doughty – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the HM Treasury

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Doughty on 2014-01-20.

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, how many employers participated in the regional employer National Insurance contributions holiday in each region.

Mr David Gauke

This Government is committed to helping UK businesses grow and create jobs. The NICs holiday was a temporary, targeted scheme to help start ups take on new staff within their first year of trading. Although take up was lower than expected, the holiday benefitted over 26,000 businesses and supported over 90,000 jobs.

Building on the lessons learnt from the holiday, we are taking action to reduce the employer NICs burden on small businesses and have created the new Employment Allowance which is simple to administer, permanent and available to all business and charities in the UK, this is reducing their employer NICs bill by up to £2,000 each year. As a result, 450,000 employers will pay no NICs at all in 2014-15.

According to the latest available figures the break down of employers that applied for the National Insurance Holiday by region, throughout the scheme is as follows:

The NICs Holiday attracted around 26,600 applicants over a three year period. Further statistical information on the scheme is available on a factsheet at: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/statistics/nics-hol.htm. The factsheet only covers periods from the start of the scheme to December 2012.

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