Support for Self-employed and Freelance Workers

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

Gary Thomson is a taxi driver in Edinburgh—one of many in the city. He has been driving for years, and until last year he worked for a private company and paid his taxes and national insurance every month. A year ago, Gary realised his lifetime ambition of setting up and started working for himself. He invested his savings and went into the unknown. It was working up until the virus struck, when demand for taxis pretty much disappeared overnight.

When Gary tried to apply for support, he was told he had not been self-employed for long enough and was excluded, even though he had been paying his taxes continuously over the qualifying period. That is unfair.

Sarah Lachhab is a tour guide in Edinburgh—one of thousands of workers in that industry in the hospitality sector. She has been running her own business for more than three years, but up until the beginning of 2019 she did not make enough from it to pay the rent, so she had some other bar jobs in the hospitality sector. When Sarah applied for support, she was told that because most of her earnings had not come from self-employment over the past three years, she too would be excluded from the self-employment income support scheme. Of course, because by then she was doing okay as a self-employed worker, she had given up the other payroll jobs. That meant she was excluded from the coronavirus job retention scheme as well. She fell between the two stools, and that is unfair.

Georgina Allison is an architect in Edinburgh. She has been self-employed for a while, but three years ago she took time off to look after a newborn child. Because her earnings were very little in that year, it brought the average of the three years for which the calculation was made much lower than it would have been otherwise. I have asked HMRC to disregard maternity periods and childcare in making the calculation, but it has refused to do so. That is not only unfair; it is blatant discrimination against female self-employed workers in this country.

All of those things need to be fixed, and it is possible to fix them. For six long months, dozens of MPs—or perhaps hundreds of MPs—on behalf of tens of thousands of constituents, have been arguing with HMRC and the Treasury to try to get something done for the people they represent. I think we have all been stunned at the degree of intransigence we have met.

We are constantly invited to applaud the schemes that have been set up. There is talk about how many people they have helped and how much money has been spent on them. I acknowledge that—I will sign anything you want to say how great it is—but that is not an excuse or a rationale for refusing to fix problems that are manifestly there in the system. In fact, the very scale of the schemes and the amount that has been spent on them make it bewildering that for a very small proportion more, the Treasury would not plug all the gaps that are clearly there. When we come to remember these schemes, I fear that they will be remembered not for their largesse and generosity, but for the parsimony and unfairness that has led to many millions of people being treated unfairly in this country.

It is not good enough for the Treasury to refuse to answer questions, to refuse to take meetings, to sit there and pretend that it does not understand what is happening. There is no reason for that, so I appeal to the Minister and her colleagues: please open your minds, open your ears and meet with us so that we can discuss the things that need to happen to put these schemes right.