To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their latest estimate for the number of UK workers who are ineligible for the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme; and what plans they have to update this estimate.
Answered on
12 March 2021
HMRC published statistics on the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) on 25 February 2021[[1]]. As at 31 January 2021 1,668,000 individuals were assessed to be ineligible for the SEISS.
The ineligible population are those self-employed individuals who HMRC identified as having traded in the tax year 2018 to 2019 and submitted their Self-Assessment tax return for that year on or before 23 April 2020, but were found not to be eligible after being assessed against the SEISS criteria. Trading profits must be between £0 and £50,000 and at least equal to non-trading income.
HMRC’s SEISS statistics will be updated in due course.
At Spring Budget the Government announced a major improvement in access to the SEISS. As the deadline for 2019-20 tax returns has now passed, HMRC will use these tax returns for the fourth and fifth grants, provided they were submitted by 2 March.
This means more than 600,000 people, many of whom became self-employed in 2019-20, may now be able to claim the fourth and fifth grants, bringing the total number of people who could be eligible to 3.7m.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/self-employment-income-support-scheme-statistics-february-2021