Published February 2021. HMRC's initial furlough payment release revealed 13 Plymouth Brethren companies that won PPE contracts in 2020 had also claimed furlough in December 2020. Techniclean Supply — with a £20 million contract — led the way. CMT Equipment claimed despite being owned by Anthony Hazell, whose family business Unispace had won £680 million in contracts months earlier.
When HMRC began publishing the names of companies that had claimed furlough payments under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, we cross-referenced the initial data release — covering December 2020 — against the list of PBCC-connected companies that had won PPE contracts earlier that year.
Thirteen companies appeared on both lists. In many cases these companies had won contracts worth more than their entire previous annual turnover. The furlough scheme was designed to protect jobs during economic hardship. Whether it was intended to benefit companies simultaneously receiving unprecedented government contract revenues is a question of ethics, not legality — claiming furlough while holding a government contract was not prohibited.
The furlough scheme paid 80% of employees' wages up to £2,500 per month when work had reduced or ceased. Using it at a time of dramatically increased turnover from government contracts — sometimes multiples of previous annual revenue — is legal but raises legitimate questions about the purpose of the scheme and who it was intended to benefit.
For context: Techniclean Supply's £20 million PPE contract alone represented a contract value dwarfing its pre-pandemic assets of £480,000. The same company, in the same December 2020 period, was claiming government support for employee wages. These two streams of public money — contract revenues and furlough support — flowing simultaneously to the same organisations is documented, not alleged.