Covid grant funding: support for 'excluded' taxpayers
An ambitious plan to help 2.9million “excluded” taxpayers deal with the impact of Covid has been building momentum over the last few months and the latest promising proposal, from the cross-party Gaps in Support APPG – the biggest All-Party Parliamentary Group in history – offer support to 2.9million excluded individuals and businesses during the pandemic, with one-off, targeted grants ranging from £3,500 to £7,500.
This will help protect the entrepreneurs that Britain desperately needs to rebuild its battered economy, say the scheme’s backers.
The Targeted Income Grant Scheme (TIGS)
The proposal called TIGS has been designed by Rebecca Seeley Harris, former Senior Policy Adviser to the Treasury’s Office of Tax Simplification, who has now presented the scheme to the Treasury to address the issue.
Four groups of UK taxpayers are covered by the scheme:
Newly self-employed
PAYE freelancers
Ltd Company Directors
Those excluded by the 50/50 rule in the SEISS
According to the APPG, the scheme is affordable, simple to administer as well as being resistant to fraudulent claims.
The reality is that missing out these excluded groups now will result in a far higher long-term cost to the Treasury, both in terms of increased unemployment and business growth in the country.
The moral argument
When the pandemic began, the Chancellor and the Prime Minister promised to support all regions across the UK, but now, almost a year on, there are still millions of people still waiting for financial support to bridge gap until normal trading can once again start.
The author of the scheme, Rebecca Seeley Harris, estimates the cost of implementing the scheme to be approximately £10.5billion. Rebecca notes that the COVID-19 financial support packages to date have been generous and were in March and April 2020 last year, set up at speed to help millions of UK businesses. However, small businesses, sole traders and entrepreneurs, the engine of the economy, are not getting the support they need or face financial ruin.
Seeley Harris argues that what is required now is to bridge the gap financially to avoid jobs cuts and lost livelihoods. It will be much more expensive to rebuild what we had later down the road than to provide the reasonable support needed now.
