The Coronavirus Self-employment Income Support Scheme
For those of you that are self-employed and have suffered a loss in income, this scheme allows you to claim a taxable grant worth 80% of your trading profits up to a cap of £2,500 per month.
To start with, this will be available for the next three months and will be paid in one lump-sum payment made directly into your bank account. It is hoped that payments will be available from the beginning of June.
It is open to those who were trading in the last financial year, are still trading now, and are planning to continue trading this year.
Your self-employed trading profits must also be less than £50,000 and more than half of your income come from self-employment. This is determined by at least one of the following conditions being true:
- having trading profits/partnership trading profits in 2018-19 of less than £50,000 and these profits constitute more than half of your total taxable income
- having average trading profits in 2016-17, 2017-18, and 2018-19 of less than £50,000 and these profits constitute more than half of your average taxable income in the same period
If you started trading between 2016-19, HMRC will only use those years for which you filed a Self-Assessment tax return.
The Government believes that 95% of self-employed will be covered by the scheme. However, those people who only recently started to be self-employed and do not have a full year of accounts will not receive any help under this scheme.
Please note that you cannot apply for this scheme yet. HMRC will use existing information to identify those eligible and will invite applications.
Full information on the help for the self-employed is available at:-
If you do not qualify for this support, then you need to apply for Universal Credit. You apply online using this link: https://www.gov.uk/apply-universal-credit
For comprehensive information on all the measures recently announced to support businesses and their employees go to:-