Coronavirus: Job-Support Schemes

Several constituents have said to me, “I will be quite honest with you; I did not need the help. I was not able to get any, but I did not need it.” The Government may have feared that everyone who earned the majority of their income from dividends would suddenly come forward and add a huge burden to the self-employment income support scheme, whereas the reality was that we could have trusted people. Yesterday, Barratt displayed a huge amount of corporate responsibility by saying that it would pay back the money that it had claimed through the furlough scheme. The fact is that a lot of people out there did not need the support, and they might not have come forward and claimed it. Perhaps we should have trusted them a little more and been a bit more flexible with the scheme.