Oral Answers to Questions

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I am happy to talk to my hon. Friend further about his particular constituency issue, which I know poses particular challenges. We have committed to providing local authorities—and indeed all Departments —with any funding required to support public services, including local transport infrastructure in their communities.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

On behalf of my constituents who will benefit from the measures that the Chancellor announced last week, may I sincerely thank him for the action that he has taken and for the responsibility that he is carrying? We are all rooting for him to succeed in the task ahead. The challenge, as others have described, is that for those who do not benefit, in particular the 5 million self-employed, the anxiety has increased, because they have seen a ship sailing carrying others but not them. I think they will be reassured that the Chancellor has given a clear commitment to do something, but many are facing a cash-flow crisis right now, so can he say a bit more to reassure them about how quickly he can implement the measures that he is considering?

[Rishi Sunak]

1 am very grateful to the hon. Member for his warm words; I appreciate them. We are looking at pace at what support can be provided. The fact is that the universe of 5 million that we are dealing with contains such a wide variety of different people that we are unable to target support. That is the challenge in designing something that gets to the people who we want to help, while at the same time being affordable and not having to benefit absolutely everybody. That is proving to be problematic, but we are hard at work on it.

In terms of delivery, it is almost certainly going to be the case that we would have to build another brand-new system to deliver any support. I am sure that hon. Members on both sides of the House would agree that, in terms of prioritising system design, the scheme that we have set up for 90% of the workforce who are employed should be delivered first and quickly, and that is what we have committed to do, ideally by the end of April. We are looking at how we can do these things in sequence or in parallel, but I take the hon. Member’s point: people are anxious. That is why we deferred the self-assessment tax return that is due shortly to provide some cash-flow benefit. We have also deferred VAT to a significant degree, which will help with cash-flow benefit, and many self-employed people will benefit from the business interruption loans, which are also interest-free.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rishi Sunak]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the importance of our armed services, and I join him in paying tribute to them for what they are doing, not just to keep us safe every day, but right now when we are calling on them to help us meet this public health emergency. As we speak, they are doing extraordinary work to help our healthcare system to respond to what is coming. We recognise that, and it will be recognised when we think about funding for the armed services not just today, but in the future.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

One newspaper is already reporting that the Chancellor will implement an income protection scheme for the self-employed and make an announcement in the next 24 hours. I must say I got a slightly longer timescale from the Chancellor’s earlier reply, when he talked about the end of April. To come back to the point about reassurance, will he give some real reassurance now to those anxious self-employed people across the country that an announcement will be made very shortly?

[Rishi Sunak]

We hope to have something to say very shortly. Implementation will take longer for the reasons I outlined, when a good point was made about capacity, whether at HMRC or DWP, to deliver brand-new schemes. However, in terms of saying what we plan to do, hopefully we can do that relatively shortly. Implementation will take longer because of the clear delivery challenges that the scheme would pose.