The government announced yesterday a new type of loan that is 100% guaranteed by the state.

The initial details suggest that you can borrow between £2,000 and £50,000 with no fees or interest for the first 12 months with no repayment for the first 12 months and a loan term of up to 6 years.

This new scheme is a follow up to the criticism over the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan (CBIL) where banks were slow to respond and the take up was low as detailed information was needed based on ‘normal’ lending requirements.

More details of the new loan will be available from Monday 4 May 2020.

Very few details have been released but what we know so far is that to be eligible for this new loan you must be:

1.      Based in the UK

2.      Have been negatively impacted by the coronavirus

3.      Were not in ‘difficulty’ on 31 December 2019

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With all that is going on at the moment it can be difficult to keep up with financial updates, of which, at this time of year, there are many. To help we have pulled together the financial changes from the GP Contract for 2020/21  into a single article for you to refer back to. Below we start with the headline announcements and finish with the usual annual changes.

New Partnership Payment

To help with recruitment of partners, from April 2020 first time partners will be offered a guaranteed one-off payment of up to £20,000 per full-time partner and £3,000 of business training allowance to support them as a new partner. 

This payment is initially in the form of a loan and only converts to a permanent payment after a fixed period of time as a partner.

Pay Transparency

From October 2020 contractors and sub-contractors are required to submit self-declarations annually if their NHS superannuable earnings are over £150,000 per annum – starting with 2019/20 in February 2021.

This threshold will rise each year in line with predicted CPI rises giving an expected threshold for 2020/21 of £153K and 2021/22 of £156K

Premises Costs Directions

Commissioners can now award improvement grants funding up to 100% of project value.

Primary Care Networks

Further to the revised network contract DES 2020/21 there has been further updates relating to the COVID-19 pandemic which have resulted in specific changes to the DES

Full details of the changes can be found here

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