It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell, and to speak on this subject today. I congratulate the hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) on securing the debate.
Like all of us, I have been contacted by constituents from a kaleidoscope of different situations who have been unable to access Government support in spite of having been hit hard by the pandemic and the lockdown restrictions. From visiting businesses in Somerset and talking to owners and managers and those in their supply chains, it seems the economy is like a pointillist painting with apparently discrete specks of colour, but when one steps back they merge into a cohesive picture. The Government have provided huge support to countless businesses and individuals—to many of those specks of
colour. It has been unparalleled in peacetime, and the package of support has ended up costing more than £300 billion, with some 14 million people supported. However, some have not been able to access that.
I met the Chancellor a few days ago and talked to him about those people. I very much understand both his intention to try to help as many as possible and the challenges in bringing more into the safety net through proper assessment. Of course, restrictions on livelihoods are about to be lifted. Those who managed to keep the show on the road ought to be back in business very soon, but there will be challenging months ahead, and we should now look carefully at those who have had to struggle without support for the past 15 months.
The different types of ineligibility are numerous and complex. We have the newly self-employed, anyone earning over £50,000 and those drawing their salaries as a dividend. This is a common one in the music sector where I have been trying to get more support. There are those with mixed income and those on zero-hour contracts such as peripatetic music teachers. This is not academic or theoretical. It is tangible and real. I know my right hon. Friend the Minister is more than sympathetic to it. The impact means businesses going bust and mounting personal debt, and there is a particular impact on younger and older workers, new parents, parents of young children and their families. I will not go into the detail of specific cases or numbers. I am sure we will hear more about that and we can argue or dispute numbers. However, we are talking about millions of people.
I hope, as we climb out of the abyss of the pandemic, we have the perspective to take a breath, look closer at overcoming the technical assessment difficulties, which I fully appreciate, and fish more people out of the pond with a net that is slightly more tightly meshed. Without wanting to mix my metaphors, that would protect those specks of entrepreneurial colour that together make up our national economic picture.
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