My hon. Friend is precisely right. That is one of the three issues the Government really need to focus on as they consider their response to this debate. If we take wedding planners, theatre, live events or conferences, we see that the Government are asking those sectors to remain closed but what is their level of support? Literally hundreds of my constituents in those sectors still cannot earn an income anything like they would have earned in normal times.
I urge the Government also to consider the newly self-employed. We had issues with people who changed jobs from February to March, when the scheme came in. The Government did find some change there, but that was where someone’s change was measured in a matter for weeks. The self-employed can be measured for a matter of months and they still cannot get included because their tax returns are measured on an annual, not monthly, basis. What will the Government do, for example, for a pet care business in Biggleswade in my constituency that suffered precisely because of that?
The criteria for the self-employed were more complex than for those in any other of the schemes that businesses or individuals could apply for. It got to a point, which I will return to in my final comments, where something in what the Government were trying to do for the self-employed was beyond the issue of providing support. I had a musician from Upper Caldecote and a performer from Sandy who were not able to access the scheme because they felt they fell on one side of the criteria and not on the other. If it was good enough for the Government to think of complex criteria for the individual to claim, why could the Government not sort out the problems for people by cross-referencing their dividends so that they could say that they were genuinely self-employed?
It is important that the Government get to grips with the issue of those who feel that they have been excluded, because the self-employed provide so much for our economy. They are the innovators. They are the people who will undercut competitor prices to deliver a better product. They want to over-deliver, because for self-employed people, it is not just about business; it is about themselves. It is how they behave and how they interact with others that is so important. The UK gets so much from the self-employed. We get a quarter of a trillion pounds of contribution to the British economy. We get higher growth. We get a world-beating labour market in terms of its efficiency. We become a front-foot nation. That is why the Government need to act.
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