More support is needed for the 3 million self-employed directors of limited companies currently excluded from government Covid support measures.
TBL welcomes the news that the government is giving consideration to the provision of financial support to the hundreds of thousands of self-employed directors of limited companies, who are not eligible for the government’s existing grants. This group have been labelled the ‘excluded’ by many in the press to date.
The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) has helped employees. This represents the majority of workers. The Self Employed Support scheme (SEISS) has helped the self-employed. This is a sizeable minority of workers.
The SEISS was set up to get support to as many people as possible in a short space of time and was therefore necessarily simplistic. A large number of workers are not employees, but fail to qualify for SEISS, such as:
- Company directors
- The newly self-employed
- Newly incorporated businesses
- Freelancers with a mix of employment and self-employment
- Gig economy workers with a number of part-time employments
- Non-trading businesses such as holiday lets
Many of these have received little or no support. Clearly the news of Government support is very welcome but provides no guarantee that additional support will be forthcoming.
To provide some practical input to support the government and to try and help the ‘excluded’ to get support, the UK200Group, of which TBL is a member, has produced a document outlining a practical and fair set of measures for the government’s consideration. We call this the Business Owners Support Scheme (BOSS).
You can read UK200Group’s Business Owners Support Scheme (BOSS) guide here > Read the guide
Here For You
We urge all small businesses owners to focus on the practical things they can and should be doing right now.
If you would like to chat about what support is out there and practical steps you can take to protect your business, please do get in touch. You can contact the team here, or call our Southend office on 01702 466 886.
