The government has provided huge amounts of
financial support to working people since the start of the
pandemic, with its furlough scheme for employees forecast to cost
£62bn in 2020-21 and the self-employment income support scheme
(SEISS) forecast to cost £21bn up to January 2021, with expected
costs of up to a further £7 billion to cover the period from
February to April 2021.
The SEISS scheme provides payments once per quarter worth 80% of
pre-pandemic profits up to a cap of £7,500 (per quarter) for
eligible self-employed workers who have been adversely affected
by the pandemic. However, despite huge spending on these support
packages, important groups of self-employed workers are not
eligible for it and there are growing calls for the government to
extend support.
In a new IFS Briefing Note, published today, we set out what we
know about who have been excluded from this support and what
options the government has it extending it to them.
Key findings:
-
The government’s “self-employment income
support scheme” (SEISS) is a generous form of income support
for those who are eligible for it. It has been paid to (at
least) 2.6 million people, costing £21 billion up to January
2021. At least three-quarters of the potentially eligible
self-employed population have taken advantage of this scheme
compared with the 30% of employees who were benefiting from the
furlough scheme at its peak last May.
-
However, around 1.8 million self-employed
people and around 700,000 company owner-managers are not
eligible for support through the scheme.
-
For some of these people it is technically
very difficult for the government to provide targeted support.
This is the case for owner-managers and newly self-employed
people.
-
This is not the case for the 1.3 million
people self-employed people who have less than 50% of their
income from self-employment, or the 225,000 people who have
profits in excess of £50,000. The government has actively
chosen to exclude these people from SEISS.
-
There are clear injustices in the way these
people are excluded, not least in the hard cut-offs which mean
someone with income of £49,999 can claim the maximum available
while someone with £50,001 can claim nothing. Equally someone
with 51% of declared income from self- employment can claim the
maximum, someone with 49% can again claim nothing.
-
More than half of people with less than 50%
of their income from self-employment have total personal
incomes of under £25,000, meaning that targeting support at
this group would affect many people with low or moderate
personal incomes. They also have relatively low levels of
self-employment profits (more than half have profits under
£5,000 per year). 45% of people in this situation are women
compared with just 35% of those supported by SEISS. We estimate
that extending SEISS to them would be relatively cheap in
comparison to other spending on government support schemes
(between £500m and £800m per quarter, with average quarterly
payments of between £600 and £1000 per person).
-
People earning over £50,000 per year in
self-employment profits have on average very high incomes.
While over half of them have incomes between £50,000 and
£100,000 some will have much higher incomes. But denying
support to them entirely creates a clear unfairness for people
who earn just over £50,000 compared to those earning just
under, and is inconsistent with how the furlough scheme works
for employees. Extending SEISS fully to this whole group would
cost £1.3 billion per quarter with a payment of £7,500 per
person. Providing a tapered form of support to those with
profits between £50,000 and £90,000 would cost must less:
around £325 million per quarter.
-
Fully supporting those with less than half
their income from self- employment and providing some support
to those with prior self-employment income between £50,000 and
£100,000 would likely cost around £1 billion per quarter. That
is just 5% of the cost of SEISS to date (and 1% of the combined
cost of the SEISS and furlough schemes to date). It is hard to
believe it would be significantly less well targeted than the
current SEISS and it would certainly support a significant
number of people facing financial difficulties.
Jonathan Cribb, Senior Research
Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said,
“The government has designed and provided incredibly generous
support to many self-employed people during the pandemic.
However, millions of people are not eligible for support for a
variety of reasons, leading to widespread frustration and many
cases of hardship. In particular, the government has arbitrarily
excluded two groups from self-employed support (those with
incomes of less than £50,000 and those with less than 50% of
their income from self-employment). At relatively low cost the
government could choose to extend the support scheme to both
groups, particularly if the created a tapered support scheme for
higher earners.”
Isaac Delestre, Research Economist
at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said,
"IFS analysis shows that costs of extending SEISS in full to over
a million people with less than half their income from
self-employment, and some support to those with incomes above the
current £50k cut-off, would cost around £1billion per quarter,
just 5% of the current cost
of SEISS to date and just 1% of the combined current cost of
SEISS and furlough schemes combined. Not all that money would be
well targeted on those in need, but much of it would. Indeed,
there is no reason to believe it would be much less well targeted
than the current SEISS which has, remarkably, been taken up by
more than three quarters of the potentially eligible
population."
