Forums Forums National News SEISS 3rd Grant

The Self Employment Income Support Scheme 3rd grant has been announced but is such a pitifully small amount that in many (if not most) cases it would be better to go unemployed and claim Universal Credit.

The sum offered is 20% of the average monthly profit and this is to cover another three months.

In other words you get 6.7% of your usual income.

The scheme was stated to be comparable to what employed support payments are, but clearly they are nothing like, an employed person will get up to 33% from Government and a least 66% total. Depending how many hours they work.

Since when is 66% or 33% comparable to 6.7%?

I read that as, 20% of your average monthly income paid x3 to cover the 3 months, and not 6.7% x3 to make up the 20%.
If that makes sense, haha!

I know, they worded it very poorly (as usual), I think they were hoping to get away with the lower figure but move to the higher figure if there is too much outburst. They have already re-worded their statement from the original but it is still open to interpretation and still biases to the lower figure if read analytically.

The statement is for two separate grants (covering six months), and it states "a taxable grant covering 20 per cent of
average monthly trading profits". So each grant is 20% of one month's profit, otherwise it should have said 20% of average quarterly profits if it was 20% of three months profit.

The first grant was stated as "80 per cent of monthly trading profits for three months", the third (and fourth) grants use the word "covering" instead of "for", big difference!

Perhaps 20% per month is the intention but its about time they went back to school on their use of English.

Hahaha!

The amount for self-employed has been doubled for both the third and fourth payments. Likewise the employed and business payments have also been re-jiggled.

I presume too many people were going unemployed as payments covering mortgage/rent and kids may have been better on unemployment than amount SEISS was paying - which was pitifully small.

Also there has been a little sneaky trick that two months weren't covered by SEISS, to date self-employed have only received 6 months worth of payments in two instalments and aren't getting another payment until January - that's a huge gap (5 months-ish?) without a payment.

I suspect to gain favour they will make a partial pre-Xmas payment.

The third SEISS grant has now been raised to 80% but so far won't be paid until the end of January.

So now its gone from 20% to 40% to 80%, make of that what you will.