The government is under mounting pressure to plug gaps in its emergency coronavirus wage subsidy schemes at the March budget to support millions of self-employed people and other workers excluded from furlough. MPs and campaign groups said the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, had repeatedly ducked opportunities to fix gaps in furlough and the self-employed income support scheme (SEISS) for almost a year since the Covid-19 pandemic began. Caroline Lucas, the Green party co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group Gaps in Support, said it was completely unacceptable that more than 3 million people had been completely left out. It is felt by campaigners that, while it was understandable at the beginning of the pandemic, when the Treasury had to act fast, that some new support schemes didn’t work as well as they should, it’s a scandal that over 10 months later, so many are still falling through the gaps. Campaign groups say the chancellor must now accept that there are genuine and problematic gaps in the schemes he designed and make support for excluded groups a centrepiece of his budget announcement next month. The government’s flagship furlough scheme has topped up the wages of almost 10m jobs since its launch in March last year, while as many as 2.7m claims have been made to SEISS, the Treasury’s similar provision for self-employed people. However, experts have warned millions of people have missed out because they fail to meet eligibility criteria. About 3 million people have been excluded from the government’s support schemes, according to the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed (IPSE), including about 700,000 limited company directors and 200,000 people who had recently set out working for themselves and lacked documentation to receive wage subsidies. As many as one-in-five small-company bosses surveyed by the Federation of Small Business (FSB) have said they received no financial support at all from the government.

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