Covid-19: Financial Support

Chris Vince Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[[R] Manuela Perteghella (Stratford-on-Avon) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered financial support for small businesses and individuals during the covid-19 pandemic.

I would like to thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing us time to debate this important issue. I also thank colleagues across the House for their tremendous support when I applied for this debate and, in particular, my friend the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden), who is the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on gaps in covid-19 financial support, of which I am an officer.

I place on record my thanks to Excluded UK for its tireless and formidable campaigning. Without its work, many of these stories would never have been heard, and many people would have been left to suffer in silence. Its staff have shown persistence, compassion, and a commitment to justice.

This debate is about a national scandal during the covid-19 pandemic, which impacted millions of individuals and families, including mine; my spouse could only apply for a bounce back loan when everything stopped. I want to speak about three things today: first, why I am campaigning on this issue; secondly, the people behind the statistics, including my constituents in Stratford-on-Avon who contacted me in desperation, and who still feel the horrendous impact of a policy decision by the then Government to exclude them from any kind of financial support; and thirdly, what needs to change.

When covid struck, the message from the Government was clear: “Help will be there, and no one will be left behind.” The Chancellor at the time, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), vowed that

“no one will be left without hope.”

For many, that was true, but for millions of others, the promise rang hollow. They paid in, they followed the rules, and when they needed support, they were told that they did not qualify. People lost their income overnight. They lost their savings and their home, and some lost their life.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I have a genuine question, because I have followed this campaign from afar. What were the reasons given by the Government at the time for these people being excluded in this way?

[Manuela Perteghella]

I thank the hon. Member, and I will get to that point. In Stratford-on-Avon and up and down the country, business owners ask a simple question: why were they excluded when they had paid tax for years? These were people running events businesses, training services or consultancies, freelancers in the arts, music or creative sectors, and small companies that formed the backbone of our local economy. That is the injustice that this debate seeks to address.

It is important to say at the outset that we do not deny the scale or urgency of the Government’s response in March 2020. The coronavirus job retention scheme and the self-employment income support scheme were introduced at a speed and on a scale never seen before. According to the House of Commons Library, the overall cost of covid-19 business support ran into tens of billions of pounds, and for many people and businesses it prevented immediate hardship and business collapse. That context matters, because it shows that the Government were capable of acting decisively, and that the state was capable of dealing with a suite of diverse and complex scenarios. The question is why, alongside that intervention, millions of people were left with nothing at all and simply abandoned.

Around 3.8 million UK taxpayers were excluded from meaningful financial support during the pandemic—a figure supported by analysis from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the National Audit Office and research cited by the Library. They included company directors paid through dividends, newly self-employed people, new businesses, pay-as-you-earn freelancers, new starters, and those on maternity, adoption or parental leave or on carer’s allowance, whose circumstances placed them just outside rigid eligibility rules. They were a substantial part of the British workforce. The Government support schemes worked well for many, but excluded millions by design.

The problem was not the absence of data, but the choice made about how that data would be used. Company directors paid through dividends were told that their income could not be verified, despite their submitting annual self-assessments, corporation tax returns and company accounts to Companies House. New businesses were excluded simply because they had not traded for long enough. Mixed-income workers were penalised for having diversified their earnings. These people were not invisible to the tax system, but they were invisible to the support schemes. The decision to exclude them was not an administrative necessity; it was a policy decision, and for that alone, the 3.8 million people left out must have an apology.

These decisions are now rightly being examined by the UK covid-19 inquiry. Module 9, which focuses on the economic response, is considering how eligibility criteria were set, how fraud risk was assessed and how trade-offs were made between speed and fairness. That scrutiny is essential, because the consequences of exclusion were not abstract; they were human, financial and, in many cases, long-lasting. The inquiry must not simply catalogue what happened, but confront what it meant for those left outside the system.