Coronavirus financial impact tracker: effectiveness of coronavirus safety nets
How effective are the safety nets?
How effective are the safety nets?
University of Bristol and Standard Life Foundation
June 2022
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.
The Financial Impact Tracker is a regular cross-sectional review of household finances across the UK, surveyed by YouGov and analysed by the University of Bristol’s Personal Finance Research Centre, in partnership with abrdn Financial Fairness Trust. All the Financial Impact Tracker reports are available here.
