News and information for West Oxfordshire’s businesses - 06 Jan 21
Another lockdown
Boris Johnson warned the coming weeks will be the "hardest yet" as he announced another national lockdown for England on Monday night. It will indeed make a very tough start to the year.
The Chancellor has swiftly announced a new support package including a one off grant for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses worth between £4,000 and £9,000 per property depending on rateable value.
The grants situation was already very complicated covering different scenarios under the Tier 2 and Tier 4 restrictions. We are asking businesses to be patient while the team waits for government guidance on the new scheme. Our priority is to get the grants administered quickly but to do so in such a way where we try to minimise the number of different applications and bureaucracy for each individual business.
We will keep you informed of developments but in the meantime, the definitive source of information is the gov.uk website.
Brexit has taken place and new rules apply to things like travel and doing business with Europe. The government's Brexit checker is a useful tool to get a personalised list of actions for you, your business and your family.
Several business groups are coming up trumps with help and advice for businesses. The ones below are good but do also check the trade association for your own sector.
Enterprise Nation - a vibrant community of small businesses and business advisers with a website packed full of resources
UK Hospitality - represents the broad hospitality sector – covering everything from bars, coffee shops, contract catering, hotels, nightclubs, visitor attractions and other leisure venues
MD2MD - helps managing directors compare notes on business MD to MD. Now operating online with a free trial period for qualifying business leaders.
Keeping up to date
Please forward this email to others to whom this might be useful and encourage them to sign up to further updates. Please note that you can access previous editions of this newsletter too.
The council Coronavirus web pages have updates about business support, communities and leisure, bins and recycling, elections and council meetings, planning, building and council news.
We hope you found this newsletter useful. We would like them to be as relevant as possible so please let us know what you think and don’t forget to send us your news to business@westoxon.gov.uk