Support for Self-employed and Freelance Workers — House of Commons, 2020-09-17
Topic: Mixed Topics
Anthony Howe Browne (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing this debate on a very important issue. If the Conservative party is anything, it is the party of entrepreneurs, strivers and people who get out of bed in the morning to create wealth, which is one of the reasons I am a Conservative. I have also been freelance—self-employed—the past couple of years, and I know how precarious it is and how one may not know how much money is coming from one month to the other. When the coronavirus crisis struck, my heart went cold when I heard accounts from some of my constituents about the sudden 100% loss of income overnight As we have heard, a huge amount of support has been provided, through a range of different schemes. That has totalled some £280 billion, with quite a lot of it focused on self-employed people. The Treasury Committee, on which I serve, produced a report on those who are excluded—it was quoted earlier—for which we talked to a range of different groups. Many people have been in very difficult circumstances, and I do not wish to minimise that, but I will say—because we have heard so many Members speak from one side of the argument—that a lot of them did get some form of support. They might not have got the self-employment income support, but often they got other forms of support, such as VAT deferral or other tax deferral, or they did not have to pay business rates, or they received grants. There is also the backstop of universal credit. I totally accept that universal credit is not much money and that it is very difficult to live on, but everyone should have access to it The one big difference between the self-employed and those on the furlough scheme, which we debated earlier, is that the self-employed could continue to work. I know from conversations that I have had with constituents that many of them who are self-employed continued to work, particularly those in the online and digital sector, although I absolutely accept that if they do not have any work, clearly they cannot continue to work The other thing about all of this is that the more we think about the detail, the more complicated it gets. We heard the discussion about dividends, for example. Actually, there are so many different circumstances in which people get dividends from different forms of work, with company directors getting dividends from investment funds and so on. It means that we cannot have an automated system. The whole point about the SEIS scheme and the furlough scheme was that it could be done rapidly and at scale because it used data that already existed and was accessible by Government. We could not do that in this case without the equivalent of some sort of self-assessment scheme, with really detailed investigations into each individual’s circumstances, which would have taken six months or so to set up. The Government’s objective, quite rightly, was to get support to as many people as possible as quickly as possible, and they did that well Another aspect of paying oneself by dividends, which obviously people do for cash-flow reasons, it that they do not pay national insurance contributions, so they are paying less. It is very complicated, and the more we look into it, the more difficult it is. I join my right hon. and hon. Friends in urging the Government to ensure that we have a Budget for freelancers and entrepreneurs, and to make sure that they are looked after.