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As Gibraltar went into lockdown, the Chamber stepped up to make sure that
its members, as well as the wider business community, would be given the
assistance needed to weather the lockdown and rebuild their businesses once
the restrictions had been lifted.
On Friday 13th March the Chamber of Commerce met with the Chief Minister,
Minister Daryanani and Financial Secretary, Albert Mena to consider what
measures could be introduced to assist businesses in the expected downturn
as Gibraltar prepared to go into full lockdown. The focus of the meeting was to
ensure that as many businesses as possible could continue to trade through the
lockdown so that employment levels could be maintained.
The speed of the growing crisis throughout Europe was such that the Chamber
had not had time to put detailed costings together for each of the proposed
measures it gave to the Government. Nevertheless, the Chamber was certain
that without Government assistance, many local companies would be unlikely
to survive the ensuing collapse in sales.
The Chamber submitted a set of proposals to the Government which it
considered would be needed by businesses to alleviate some of the effects of
the expected downturn. At that stage, nobody knew how long the lockdown
would last or how bad the downturn would be.
The Chamber implored the Government to be bold and to act quickly.
The Government and Civil Service officials worked tirelessly throughout that
weekend to consider each of the measures in detail and where possible, put an
estimated cost to each of them.
On Monday 17th March, the Chief Minister announced an emergency budget
with a comprehensive set of measures to assist local businesses. It was by far
the largest and most extensive set of economic assistance announced by any
Government in Gibraltar’s history.
Many of the measures announced by the Government were as a direct result
of the submissions made by the Chamber of Commerce. Among others these
included rates relief, rent holiday on government-owned commercial premises,
the temporary abolition of import duty for traders, extended payment terms for
PAYE and social insurance. These measures were made not only on behalf of
our members, but also on behalf of all businesses in Gibraltar.
As part of the process, the Government looked at every major cost which a local
business would face and considered how to alleviate these by including them in
what it termed relevant sectors (“hospitality, leisure, distributive trades”). The
Government extended assistance to all sectors for certain costs but targeted the
measures to those sectors which were likely to be affected the most.
Some of the proposals which the Chamber put to Government were not
adopted at the time. The Chamber has continued to push for these as it felt
that they would also be useful to local businesses and help them to recover
once the lockdown was lifted.
Eight days later on the 25th of March, the Government introduced a second set
of measures to help businesses pay the wages and salaries of employees in the
relevant sectors. In the space of just a few weeks, businesses in these sectors had