Business support scheme goes digital

Thursday 14 May 2020

A new digital system, which could significantly speed up the States' covid business support process, is likely to be up and running in the next fortnight.

At the moment, the system is operated manually by people working from home, meaning it can take some time for applications to go through.

So far, around 2,700 submissions for business support have been processed - with more than £5m spent on business grants and £7m on payroll assistance. But, there are still many people waiting for their payments to come through.

"It is a completely live system, so there are people changing their applications, there are people going from the 20% contribution to 100% support being requested, there's continuum of payrolls month on month being requested - the backlog is a continuum," explained States Chief Executive, Paul Whitfield.

Pictured: Paul Whitfield.

"Is it perfect? Most definitely not, but the understanding behind that has got to be that the system dealing with several thousand applicants is all done by staff working remotely, off a system that was set up before we went into lockdown. Requests for people to apply were made in front of having any system in place and we took those by way of email applications.

"There isn't some sophisticated database gathering these, or monitoring these or distributing the work. You can see where there might be some clunkiness, but that is the environment we're working in."

But that could all change in the coming weeks, as the system is transferred online.

"Whilst we’ve been doing this and accept it’s not as good as it could be, we’ve had a technology solution built with our partners, Agilisys working with our staff," Mr Whitfield continued. "We are stress testing that at the moment and hoping, imminently, the system will be fully digitalised.

"Of course, that will give us the accuracy of information; those that have processed, those that are backlogged and still waiting, and those that have reapplied.

Pictured: Businesses will be able to apply for support online.

"It’s built and completed. The difficult task is taking all those spread sheets from the staff that are working remotely and manually inputting them into the new digitalised system in order to get accuracy.

"I’m hoping within the next fortnight we’ll have that digital solution up and running, which will make such a world of difference both to those applying and to those operating the system."

However, some applications may still take longer to process while the team ensures the businesses are eligible for support.

"Some of these are quite complex and there is a necessity to do close scrutiny on some of them. The objective is to support business, but of course we are using public funds and therefore some of them need more scrutiny in order to approve than others. That may include checking on bank details, trading histories, how long the business has been viably up and running etc.

"Sometimes it’s really clear and people are giving us access to banking and trading statements - they make it very swift. Others are not so obvious and have business accounts set up in different ways, and some people would normally use accountants for support and maybe haven’t got the same access they have in this particular period of lockdown.

Pictured: Some local businesses will still have to wait for their payments.

"There is a different quality of information being passed on to the business support team, who are having to work through that and make sense of it.

"Quite clearly, there’s been people that have submitted that just do not fit the criteria for business support. Where justifiable and where right, they have been directed to areas such as the hardship fund, but two or three cases have been somewhat spurious and needed a raised eyebrow as to why they would be applying. But the majority of people have applied because they think they may fit the criteria for business support."

Further information on the support available to businesses can be found here.