At 11:59pm tonight – 2nd of December 2021 all of New Zealand will move to the new COVID-19 Protection Framework (traffic light system).
You can read about what this mean’s for businesses and about the capacity limits / defined spaces in the following links:
• Requiring My Vaccine Passes for Entry – How you can check these and the verifier app you can use for visitors to your premises .
• COVID-19 Resource Toolkit – Contains posters you can use in your business
• What the framework means for businesses / capacity limits.
• COVID-19 Protection Framework.
If you are vaccinated, and haven’t downloaded your vaccination record / pass, you can do this here.
Here are some of the main points for each level:
Business Support That Will Be Available Under The COVID Protection Framework:
- Short Term Absence Payment and Leave Support Scheme – these schemes remain available to help pay employees who are required to stay home to await test results or are required to
self-isolate, when the employee is unable to work from home. The leave support scheme payments will be changing from 2 weeks to a weekly payment once we are in the new COVID Protection Framework and applications will be available through the Work and Income website. - Wage Subsidy – The 8th round of the wage subsidy is available until 9 December 2021. There are
no other wage subsidy rounds planned at this stage. - There are still three Resurgence Support Payments available for eligible businesses. You can find
out if your eligible here. The amounts for the stated support payments are as follows:
- Small Business Cash Flow Loan Scheme – Applications for this scheme will remain open until 31 December 2023. You can view more details here.
- For Businesses that have faced higher Alert levels (in places such as Auckland, Waikato and Northland) there is a one off Transition payment available for eligible businesses who have experienced reduced income between 3 of October and 9 November. The criteria and payments are managed in the same way as the Resurgence Support payment and applications will be available through the IRD Website from the 10th of December 2021.