Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what recent measures his Department has taken to support self-employed workers whose trade is affected by ongoing covid-19 restrictions.

The Government announced at Budget 2021 that the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) will continue until September, with a fourth and a final fifth grant. This provides certainty to business as the economy reopens and places the SEISS among the most generous schemes for the self-employed in the world.

The Government has also announced a major improvement in access to the SEISS. HMRC will now take into account 2019-20 tax returns to determine eligibility and calculate the fourth and fifth grants. This will increase the number of self-employed people who could claim these grants by about 600,000 to a total of up to 3.7 million.

The fourth SEISS grant, available to be claimed from late April, will be worth 80% of average trading profits, paid out in a single instalment covering three months’ worth of annual profits, and capped at £7,500 in total.

The fifth and final SEISS grant will cover May to September. Further details of the SEISS grants will be published in due course.

The fourth and fifth SEISS grants constitute an estimated £13.5bn of additional support, taking total support for the self-employed to over £33 billion since the start of the pandemic.

In addition, there have been extensions within the wider package of support for the self-employed.

The temporary £20 per week increase to the Universal Credit standard allowance has been extended for six months, and the Government has decided to extend the suspension of the Minimum Income Floor for three months, to the end of July 2021, so that where self-employed claimants' earnings have fallen significantly, their Universal Credit award will have increased to reflect their lower earnings.