Thousands of UK businesses that do not own or rent a property, and who work from home or serviced offices have been excluded from the Chancellors latest rescue package, say leading
Richard Churchill, a business advisory partner at tax and advisory firm, Blick Rothenberg said: “While the up to £9,000 per property to provide additional support to those hardest hit businesses in retail, hospitality and leisure is welcome to address the latest lockdown, it excludes many businesses and individuals in these sectors who do not have a physical property.”
Churchill added: “ In recent years many businesses have utilised the increased flexibility that serviced office spaces provide and many people work from home, but they are still very much part of these heavily impacted sectors and provide a variety of services to events and projects that are delivered around the country.
“ They provide support services to venues that can claim the allowance, but they cannot.”
Churchill said: “ Grants should be available to all businesses in these sectors and should not be linked to having a physical property.”
He added: “ Access to additional funding will also be required by these businesses as lock down ends and they seek to bounce back for a third time.
“ The chancellor needs to provide details of his successor loan scheme in conjunction with increasing the limits of the bounce back loan scheme and level of guarantee for the CBIL scheme to ensure these effected businesses have sufficient access to finance to be able to open for trade once this current lockdown ends.”
Churchill said: “Just greater debt for businesses is not the answer and a joined-up approach to allow business owners and Government to benefit from the growth of businesses in the future who access these support measures should form part of the successor loan scheme.”
He added: “ Many self-employed individuals are engaged in these sectors and whilst eligible for the self-employed income support scheme this is still based upon 6 April 2018 – 5 April19 tax return data. This excludes all of those who became self-employed after 5 April 2019.
“The support also excludes those who erroneously did not file a tax return until after the deadline for 2019. This mostly affects those who did not file as they were below the earnings limit and thought no filing was necessary as no tax was due.
“While in a normal year this lack of filing would often be a small issue – many people have lost out on support payments from HMRC, even if filings have been brought up to date.”
Churchill concluded: “ This system needs to be updated to reflect 6 April 2019 – 5 April 2020 data in the interest of fairness and to address some of the largest excluded groups from the current and previous support measures.”
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