Around 1.4m workers benefit from payment deferment

As of July 20, almost 1.4 million employees have benefited from a phased supportive policy on deferring the payment of housing provident fund contributions, according to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development on Thursday.

Those workers, who come from 23,000 enterprises, are allowed to defer contributions of roughly 7.1 billion yuan ($ 1.1 billion), said ministry spokesman Wang Shengjun at a news conference on Thursday. 

The housing authority, together with the Ministry of Finance and the People's Bank of China, jointly released a circular on the policy in late May to help enterprises and individuals tide over difficulties amid the epidemic.

Companies affected by the epidemic can apply for postponing the payment of housing provident fund contributions and make the payment afterward, the circular said.

The document also said, for depositors who fail to pay the contributions within the stipulated time due to the impact of COVID-19, the deferment will not be submitted to the credit administration as loan delinquency on their credit reports.

It urged local authorities to raise the withdrawal quota for housing rental payments based on local conditions, and support the depositors to draw from the fund whenever they are in need. The supportive measures will be tentatively valid until the end of this year, it said.

As of July 20, over 1.8 million people across the country have been allowed to draw higher amount from the fund to pay housing rents, Wang said. In total, they had drawn almost 8.9 billion yuan from the fund.