XXX

Member of Parliament XXX

House of Commons, London

SW1A 0AA

 

12 May 2020

Dear XX

I am writing to you about the impact of HMG’s Self Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) rules on self-employed mothers. 

As you may know 47% of those working in the creative industries are self-employed, compared to 15% of the workforce overall, so this scheme is particularly important for the sector.

Under the current guidance, self-employed women cannot exempt periods of maternity leave from the calculation used to work out their average income, which is what the SEISS payments are based upon. This means that women who have taken periods of maternity leave in the tax years, 2016-17, 2017-18 or 2018-19 will receive significantly less financial support than if they had not taken maternity leave, and the amount received will bear no relation to their usual trading profits.

 

A report by the Association of Independent Professionals and Self Employed, IPSE, shows the self-employed gender pay gap to be 43%. This is only likely to increase unless the government changes the rules around accessing SEISS.

 

We are extremely concerned that reducing many self-employed women’s income even further will cause extreme hardship to families with young children, and force mothers out of business.

 

 According to a response to our FOI request, approximately 25,000 self-employed mothers claim maternity allowance every year, so we estimate around 75,000 mothers could be affected.

 

We urgently call on all parliamentarians to ask HMG to change the rules, allowing mothers who are affected to exempt periods of maternity leave from the SEISS calculation. The simplest way of doing this would be to allow eligible mothers the flexibility to nominate their best year out of the three currently being assessed.

 

We would be grateful if you could raise this with urgency as applications for SEISS are beginning this week.

 

Below are some template PQ’s.

 

• To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what considerations of Public Sector Equality Duty were made by his department when deciding the rules for SEISS, regarding women and new mothers in particular.
• To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what impact assessments were made regarding people with protected characteristics before deciding on the rules of SEISS.
• To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he will consider changing the rules to allow women who took maternity leave in the relevant years to exempt periods of maternity leave from the SEISS average income calculation.
• To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy what consideration he has given to the potential for a differential impact on women’s businesses due to the failure of SEISS to discount periods of maternity leave when calculating financial support.
• To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport what consideration he has given to the potential for a differential impact on self-employed women in the creative industries due to the failure of SEISS to discount periods of maternity leave when calculating financial support.

 

Joeli Brearley

Pregnant Then Screwed