Over 1.0m left out of Covid-19 income support warn MPs

MPs warned the Treasury that over 1.0m people were being left out of the Covid-10 income support schemes and urged the government to help cover everyone in need of the plan.

The all-party Treasury select committee (TSC) said some struggling Britons are unable to benefit from the Chancellor’s schemes for salaried employees and the self-employed.

Committee members urged the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to keep his promise to “do whatever it takes” to protect individuals and businesses from the impact of the pandemic and fill the gaps in the job retention scheme and the self-employment income support scheme.

The MPs found that “rolling out financial support at pace and scale has inevitably resulted in some hard edges in policy design and some critical gaps in provision”.

Hundreds of thousands of people were suffering financial hardship through no fault of their own, often due to unfortunate timing in starting a new job or their employer’s choice of timing in submitting paperwork to HMRC.

The newly employed were also being left out of the scheme .

Newly self-employed Britons were being left out as those who had started their business in 2019 do not qualify for support from the SEISS under the current the eligibility criteria.

Self-employed people who earn over £50,000, the threshold set by the government, freelancers in industries such as theatre and television and directors of companies who pay themselves in dividends should also be covered by the income support measures, they said.

TSC chair Mel Stride said that while chancellor Rishi Sunak had acted with “impressive scale and pace” in response to the coronavirus pandemic, he must extend support to those not covered by its job support packages.

“The Committee has identified well over a million people who – through no fault of their own – have lost livelihoods while being locked down and locked out of the main support programmes,” said Stride.