Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Rishi Sunak is set to announce a fourth and final round of the £7,500 grant for the self-employed in next week’s Budget.
As before, certain self-employed will be able to claim a Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEIISS) grant worth up to £7,500 over three months covering February, March and April.
However, if true, next week’s announcement again ignores the over a million people who have been excluded from self-employed grants because either they have a parallel source of income or they pay themselves in dividends or they earn over £50,000 a year.
Last month, influential thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the Government should act to help self-employed excluded from Covid support because more than 50 pe cent of their income came from elsewhere, an exclusion which disproportionately attacked women on modest incomes.
>See also: Government must help self-employed excluded due to 50% income rule
Meanwhile, business groups have written to Mr Sunak urging him to help the nearly 800,000 company directors frozen out of emergency Covid-19 support, which they saw as a stealth attack by HMRC because company directors pay corporation tax at the lower 19 per cent rate.
However, according to the Telegraph, the grant