Thread by @faisalislam

So we at @BBCBusiness & economics team are doing our best to put together as much info, as it comes in about support packages from Government for wages, jobs, and funding.

We’ve had lots of qs already, please feed into us and we will get answers that we can for you this week:..

Chancellor tells Commons re self employed and freelancers
“Will be making further announcements, looking at in intense detail... there are genuine practical and principled reasons why it is incredibly complicated to design an analogous scheme, but rest assured we understand...”

“We are determined to find a way to support them. We need to be confident this case be done in a way which is deliverable and is fair to the vast majority of the British workforce” Chancellor tells @MPritchardUK ...

“We are looking at this in immense detail and at pace there are Genuine questions about practicality, fairness and delivery which is why it requires careful thought” Chancellor Sunak tells @scottmann4NC

Chancellor keeps on referencing “fairness” of scheme for self employed to rest of taxpayers - not sure if this is ref to some talk about PAYE employees having paid higher taxes than self-employed... practical issues include fact that earnings for many self emp are very lumpy

Chancellor says he cant commit to a specific day on self employed:
“Partly the issue is of Course there are people whose incomes have been enormously impacted, but there are also millions who have not been impacted and whose incomes indeed might be increasing.”

“Ability of Gov to distinguish between those people based on tax returns over a year and a half out of date poses some v significant challenges in terms of fairness and affordability,” says the Chancellor to SNP’s @cllrthomson

Chancellor says “we are not in favour of a Universal Basic Income, tho we have strengthened the safety net...” to @cllrthomson

Chancellor: “we don’t have the ability to target support” among 5m diverse self employed.

“That’s the challenge in designing something that gets to people we want it to help, while same time being affordable, not having to benefit absolutely everybody.. proving problematic

Sunak to @wesstreeting

“almost certainly the case we would have to build another brand new system to deliver any support and sure House will agree that in terms of prioritising system design, the scheme we have set up for for 90% of people employed should be delivered first”...

Reading between the lines of what the Chancellor is saying...the key eligibility hurdle for the Job Retention Scheme is “furloughing” which is a legal declaration made by firms to HMRC - provides a fiscal limit mechanism & legal redress against abuse. How to do for self employed?

“Furloughing” is also the reason why the Job Retention Scheme is not applying to those who have had reduced hours generally spread across workforce. And yes, there is an incentive instead for furloughing half staff and keeping rest full time... part of this is to help isolation.

Sunak: “possible certainly to use historical returns, they are a year & half out of date, so necessarily imperfect. Also they do not provide an easy way to distinguish those whose incomes are affected, and those much more wealthy whose incomes are increasing,” to @DesmondSwayne

Chief Secretary asked by 2 diff MPs to guarantee self employed package will be available by end of week.

Does not:
“Meeting on this today and we are hoping to bring forward proposals in the coming days...
“actively looking at this, hoping to bring proposals in the coming days”

So @KevinBrennanMP says that “whatever it takes” should apply to self-employed, and they should get equivalent help to employed... Barclay says “help is coming, we’ll do whatever it takes”... MPs, while not hostile, are clearly v concerned...

Treasury here Chief Sec stressing, basically, there aren’t 5 million self employed workers - there are 5m self-employment tax returns, 1m of which are for less than £2k, some for property, some are over pension age, some recipients of UC...