Top retailers ‘make £700m and keep furlough funds’
05 October 2022
The Sunday Times says the UK’s top five auto retailers have collectively made almost £700m in 2021 “but have refused to repay nearly £250m of taxpayer-funded furlough bailouts”.
It highlighted Arnold Clark (£263m profit), Sytner (£178m), Lookers (£90m) and Vertu (£80m) and said that “unlike the vast majority of other retailers, the car dealers have refused to pay a penny back for the support they received during 2020, even though they took advantage of the pandemic to lay off thousands of workers”.
“Furlough money was not profit,” responded one commentator. “It was provided to part-pay staff so that companies wouldn’t make them redundant. I don’t know why a company would pay it back when they’ve avoided shifting people to the welfare system where the taxpayer would end up paying anyway.”
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