Community: The self-employed are “falling into the abyss” during Covid

The Conservative Party is supposed to champion the entrepreneur. Tories are expected to be on the side of the person willing to take a bit of risk in the hope of creating something innovative, starting a business that could flourish. But the lack of support for freelancers and self-employed people during the pandemic has provided the clearest example yet that the ruling party is also ruthless towards this group of workers, who have been punished amid coronavirus.

“It just goes against the government’s entire levelling up agenda, doesn’t it? If you want to level up a nation, you don’t leave half of them behind with no financial support and put them in dire circumstances,” Kate Dearden tells me. The head of research, policy and external relations at Community Union has spoken out against the treatment of the UK’s self-employed workers throughout coronavirus, via media appearances, lobbying the Treasury and engaging with trade union members – many of whom have found themselves entirely excluded from state support.

Community describes itself as a “proud champion of the five million strong self-employed and freelance community across the UK” and a few years ago launched a drive to sign up self-employed workers. Kate is responsible for analysing sectors in which the union has members, monitoring how government policy is affecting those workers, building relationships including with the Labour Party and shadow cabinet, and looking after the union’s campaigns. In fact, Community has just launched a new one, ‘We are the UK’s self-employed‘, which aims to educate people about what self-employment really looks like.

Kate says Community members have told her that people seem to have the impression “they’re tax-dodgers, they’re wealthy, they don’t need support – but that is not the case at all”. Has Rishi Sunak reinforced that impression with the lack of aid available to these particular workers? Self-employment is “not what Rishi Sunak and his friends might think it is”, Kate tells me. “Our members just say all the time, ‘we just want to be treated equally, we pay into the system too’.”

The Chancellor unveiled the self-employment income support scheme (SEISS) in March. It was originally set at an equivalent level to schemes for employees, in the form of a taxable grant worth 80% of average monthly trading profits, capped at £7,500 over three months, although this excluded the newly self-employed and saw mothers of kids under four receive less as they were not able to exempt maternity leave periods from the SEISS calculation. The situation is now getting worse. Even after the third version of Sunak’s winter economy plan, the self-employed are set to receive just 40% of average monthly trading profits – even if their work has dried up entirely due to Covid.

Kate describes 40% as “a bit of a joke”, and that is if they’re eligible. “I think the government does not understand self-employment or what it means to be self-employed,” she says. “They don’t understand the jobs self-employed people do, the sectors they work in, and how – in the creative industry, for example – they’ve massively struggled, both because they work in that sector and because they’re self-employed. The government don’t understand their working arrangements or lack of safety net – or they do and don’t care.”

What should the government be doing differently? “We want to see those gaps plugged, a great increase to the SEISS, and looking at how we can address the disparities that the self-employed have experienced throughout the crisis. They’ve had no safety net, no sick pay. How do you expect them to get by and protect their livelihoods and families if they don’t have the basic things that every worker should be entitled to?”

To include the excluded, the government could ask SEISS applicants to nominate years to calculate average incomes, Kate suggests. They could offer kickstarter loans to those who’ve missed out, and could give extra money to local authorities for the newly self-employed as they did in Scotland. “There’s loads of different ways that we could get money to self-employed workers who’ve missed out quickly, and we just wish the government would act soon and listen.” Community also backs sick pay being extended to the self-employed both during coronavirus and beyond the pandemic.

Kate recognises that trade unions haven’t always prioritised the self-employed, and she describes it as “transformative” that the movement is now reaching out to those workers, “which traditionally it wouldn’t have in the past”. What about the Labour Party? It has often appeared comfortable talking about bogus self-employment but less so when it comes to the genuinely self-employed, I suggest. “I think it’s got a lot better,” Kate says. She is pleased that from the start of Covid-19, Anneliese Dodds has called for targeted support for the self-employed and only last week Labour protested that half a million are being “left in the lurch” by the Chancellor.

“We need to bring that collectivism together for the self-employed,” Kate Dearden tells me. “It might not be collective bargaining, but we can stand up for issues that matter to them in their work, on health and safety, on sick pay, on a gender pay gap that is still uncertain about the self-employed community. Loads of issues, particularly around disabled self-employers workers – that’s a growing section of the community.”

In that mission, Community has launched a new self-employment inquiry this month with Prospect Union. Investigating how the self-employed have been hit by Covid, it aims to report before the next Budget on measures they want to see taken. One of the areas of scrutiny will be the future tax regime. Sunak hinted in March that he would raise National Insurance paid by the self-employed, saying: “If we want to all equally benefit from state support, we must all pay in equally.” This argument has since been weakened by his increasingly asymmetrical schemes.

Kate describes Sunak’s threat as “a Tory way of doing things”, and says the government should not be looking at tax changes in this area without consulting the self-employed. This is Community’s key focus: creating a collectivism for these often overlooked and misunderstood group of workers, and giving them a voice. Because as one of their members said, “People aren’t just ‘slipping through the cracks’, they are falling into the abyss.” Kate sums it up: “Self employed are workers too. That’s the home of the trade union movement and the home of Labour. If we can be that voice and that home, that changes the perception of who the self-employed are and who the labour movement is here to represent.”