Lord Purvis of Tweed
Main Page: Lord Purvis of Tweed (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Purvis of Tweed's debates with the Cabinet Office
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, we estimate that 95% of small businesses will benefit from the structure of the schemes we have been discussing. Beyond that, we have made enhancements to the universal credit system that will benefit small business proprietors who are caught and do not benefit from the broader measures. I can put into Hansard a detailed explanation of how those changes work, because they are quite complicated and I am conscious of the need for brevity.
The self-employed will have to wait another month before they can start applying for support, and it will be six weeks from now until the first payments. The Canadian Government announced support packages for the self-employed and the employed on 15 March, and payments started to be processed last week for Canadian businesses. What is preventing the Government fast-tracking support for self-employed people, who have this huge uncertainty, especially women and mothers who have to look after children and on whose income this will have a real impact now?
My Lords, as I mentioned earlier, we have pushed out some £6 billion of grant payments already, and when HMRC opened its Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme on 20 April some 185,000 claims had already been made. So the money is going out, but I accept that it needs to go out more quickly.