Sunak sticks with SEISS support scheme for the self-employed

The chancellor has extended the SEISS scheme to help the self-employed through pandemic-induced difficulties.

There is good news and bad for self-employed workers whose businesses are still being damaged by the Covid-19 pandemic. On the positive front, Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Budget announced another round of the self-employment income support scheme (SEISS); it will also now potentially cover hundreds of thousands of people previously excluded. Less happily, many self-employed people will continue to miss out.

Roughly 200,000 newly self-employed will, for the first time, be able to claim help from the SEISS from April. These are people who became self-employed in the 2019-2020 tax year and therefore had not filed a tax return that could be used as a basis for making a claim. This group should all have filed returns for 2019-2020 by 31 January, so the chancellor is admitting them to the scheme.

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David Prosser
Business Columnist

David Prosser is a regular MoneyWeek columnist, writing on small business and entrepreneurship, as well as pensions and other forms of tax-efficient savings and investments. David has been a financial journalist for almost 30 years, specialising initially in personal finance, and then in broader business coverage. He has worked for national newspaper groups including The Financial Times, The Guardian and Observer, Express Newspapers and, most recently, The Independent, where he served for more than three years as business editor.