It is a pleasure to support freelancers and self-employed people in my constituency who have fallen through the cracks of what I recognise has otherwise been an extremely generous financial package provided by the Treasury for so many people. As I have gone about my constituency over the past few months, so many people have thanked me—people in business and employees—for the support that they have received from the Chancellor. However, I want to use this opportunity to highlight three cases in my constituency.
The first is that of Andy Warren, a co-director of the long-established Congleton company Printing Group (UK) Ltd. He refers to the fact that dividend-receiving company owner-managers are effectively discriminated against from receiving support. He says:
“HMRC is happy to accept our word on our income tax returns (that are self-assessed), on our corporation tax returns (that are self-assessed), on the furlough claims we make for our
staff, and on our entitlement to a bounce-back loan. We even have to self-declare that we have to repay child benefit. None of these are verified by a third-party, we are taken at our word. So why is it not acceptable regarding our dividends?”
Secondly, I would like to turn to the concerns expressed by another constituent, Dave Boutcher, who is a director of Thorn Distribution Ltd, a warehousing and distribution company with 15 staff. Neither he nor his co-director have received anything by way of benefit from any national scheme or council support package for themselves or their company. They have not even received any furlough money, due to a technicality on the payroll submission date, but being the honourable employers that they are, they have paid out some £100,000 of their own money to their staff, effectively furloughing their staff out of their own funds. I wrote to the Treasury about this on 13 May and received a generic reply letter on 8 September. I am asking the Treasury to look again at their case, which their accountant says is one of the worst they have seen in a system with no flexibility and no appeal.
Finally, I would like to talk about my constituent Lauren Scott, a self-employed musician. We have heard a lot about musicians in the debate, and I would like to tell the House about Lauren’s circumstances. Lauren is a highly professional harpist, and her husband Andy is a composer and teacher. Over the past 10 years of my being a Member of Parliament, no individuals have done more in my constituency to promote the arts, and particularly the engagement of young people in music, than Andy and Lauren Scott. I have heard Lauren perform many times as a harpist, and I have heard one of Andy’s pieces premiered at the Southbank Centre.