Support for Self-employed and Freelance Workers

Anthony Browne Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I absolutely agree. The people we are talking about are in every sector of our economy and our society, and they are hurting.

Back in June, the Treasury Committee published a unanimous report called “Gaps in support” as part of the inquiry into the economic impact of coronavirus. It found that hundreds of thousands of self-employed people are suffering hardship because of features like the disqualification of anyone who started a business in the last year. The Select Committee made some clear practical recommendations for change. I agree with the Chair of the Committee, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), that urgently enacting those recommendations and helping those who have fallen through the gaps is the only way for the Government to, as he puts it, fairly and

“completely fulfil its promise to do whatever it takes”.

Sadly, the Government’s response to the “Gaps in support” report was predictable: they made excuses and cited obstacles, when what we need is action. So let me say just a little more about some of those who are falling through the gaps. I mentioned small limited companies whose directors take all or part of their income in dividends. I want to stress that that is common practice; there is nothing suspicious about doing that—it is what people do when they are starting up small businesses, and they plough that money back into those businesses in the early days.

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

How is Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs meant to know where the dividend income comes from, because when people fill in their tax return, they do not have to say the source of it? It could be dividend income from massive stock market investments, and why should they get subsidised for that?

[Caroline Lucas]

A whole range of practical proposals has been set out by the Treasury Committee, ExcludedUK and many others documenting the other paperwork that could be presented, including records from tax returns and so forth, that can make sure that this scheme is not open to fraud. If the political will is there, a way can be found using a range of different documentation to demonstrate that the money that people are applying for is absolutely legitimate. We can look at bank statements, for instance. It is not beyond the wit of people to make sure that people in our constituencies are not literally having to go to food banks, as an hon. Member mentioned the other day, in order to be able to put food on the table.

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[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Lady is exactly right. Just a first step will be for the Government to acknowledge that there is a problem. Instead of sticking their fingers in their ears and going, “La, la, la”, they need to accept there is a problem here, and I am sure if we all got around the table we could find a way through this.

The vast majority of those small limited companies do not have commercial premises either, so they do not qualify for business grants. Nor do they see taking on large debts in such an uncertain business landscape as a realistic option. Furlough has been a Catch-22 for company directors: unpredictable cash flow means their salaries are low, so the scheme does not cover living expenses, yet if they furlough they are not allowed to work on saving the businesses that are in question.

The scheme has also routinely excluded carers and parent. As part of its inquiry into the impact of covid-19 on maternity and parental leave, the Petitions Committee heard evidence from the brilliant campaigning group, Pregnant Then Screwed. It was told that, because the self-employed scheme fails to properly accommodate women who incur a loss of earnings when taking time off for maternity leave, the gender pay gap among the self-employed, which is already at 43%, will increase, as will the likelihood of women’s businesses failing due to a lack of financial support.

[Anthony Browne]

The hon. Member is absolutely right that people furloughed generally are not allowed to work. But there is an exemption that the Government brought in for company directors who are furloughed—they are allowed to carry on with their company director duties, including saving their business.

[Caroline Lucas]

If they do not have any money, they cannot save their business, can they? That seems an odd intervention to make.

The Petitions Committee urged the Government to amend the scheme to take into account periods of maternity and paternal leave to ensure fairness and equality, yet, once again, Ministers have deliberately looked the other way. That phrase “whatever it takes” apparently does not stretch to ending discrimination against self-employed women. Nor do they care very much about freelancers, especially those on short-term PAYE contracts, as is now common practice because of HMRC requirements. They are caught between a rock and a hard place: denied access to the job retention scheme and the chance to be furloughed, yet often not earning enough from self-employment to qualify for the self-employed scheme.

In some sectors of our economy, freelance working is especially common. In my own Brighton constituency, for example, a number of people work in the arts. Three in four jobs in the arts across the country are freelance. They are the people who make the plays, the musicals and live experiences that are a part of the fabric of British life. We do not always see what they do, but they are invaluable, yet one in three of the skills base in theatre, for example, have missed out on any Government support since March, with disabled people, people of colour and early career workers disproportionately affected. Young people are also over-represented compared with other sectors of the economy. Therefore, rather than recovery, we see a sector that is facing total collapse.

Failure adequately to support the cultural, creative and events industries has put at risk 16,000 jobs across Brighton and Hove and £1.5 billion in turnover. My inbox, like, I am sure, the inboxes of many other hon. Members, is full of emails from constituents forced to abandon long-standing careers in the arts because there is no income support for them as freelancers.

Many working in media and journalism are similarly struggling, as the National Union of Journalists has evidenced, with its members routinely treated as employees for tax purposes, yet not eligible for furlough and not afforded the same protections and rights as staff when it comes to employment law.

Another group of people hard hit is those who choose to combine self-employment with PAYE income. I have a number of constituents in that situation, often as a result of being midway through making the transition to running their own company and being wholly self-employed.

None of this is inevitable. All of it is the result of a conscious choice by the Government to abandon anywhere between 3 million and 6 million self-employed people and freelancers. As the current self-employed scheme winds down, now is the time to change tack and do the right thing by these people. The details of a more inclusive scheme have been set out by the campaign groups and by the Treasury Committee. The ForgottenLtd group published a rescue package. Backed by the Federation of Small Businesses and other business groups, it sent it to the Treasury over a month ago, and it is still waiting for a response.

I appreciate how much other people need and want to speak, so let me quickly, in my last few minutes, outline three things that can be done. First, we can retrospectively expand the self-employed scheme. Bring those people who have been excluded from it into its ambit and make it fair by retrospectively starting it from 1 March to give it parity with the furlough scheme.

Secondly, as well as looking back, we need to look forward, so the Government should immediately extend the duration to the many sectors where the self-employed are a significant part of the workforce and which will not be back to anything like normal for some time to come. Thirdly, the Government should be looking at ways of keeping pace with the changing shape of the economy, balancing public health and economic priorities with the likelihood of more local lockdowns, for example. Part of the answer to that is a basic income scheme. The self-employed and job retention schemes do not work in tandem with the welfare system and therefore do not approach anything like a proper safety net. Many people have not been able to claim universal credit. Some have received no support whatever and the consequences are devastating, so much so that ExcludedUK has been working with the Samaritans on creating a dedicated helpline called Mind the Gap for those experiencing mental health problems. There is a simple and effective way to start to put things right and a universal basic income delivered via a welfare system that lifts everybody up would be a key cornerstone of that.



In conclusion, on Tuesday the Chancellor said he had

“not hesitated to act in creative and effective ways to support jobs and employment,”—[Official Report, 15 September 2020; Vol. 680, c. 160]—

and promised he would continue to do so. The self-employed and freelancers rightly want that creativity to apply to them as well. The Treasury has demonstrated time and again that it does not understand self-employment, so at the very least those of us standing up for the excluded are asking this again today: please will the Minister go back to the Treasury team and ask them to meet us so that at the very least they can understand what is at stake here? The stakes could not be higher: people’s businesses are being destroyed and their lives are being destroyed. That is not right and that is why so many Members want to speak in this debate.

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[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

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.