Ah good. As a freelancer, I feel better now I realise how well the Government has looked after me.
Oh, hang on. Turns out I was just suffering some sort of lockdown delusion. I’m managing to beg 2 days work a month - just enough to disqualify me from any help at all, which would only have amounted to about £150 a week anyway.
And my work will come back... ermmmm.... maybe never, as my industry moves on fast. Every colleague I know is in the same situation.
Just to top things off, if/when I do get back to work (probably on vastly reduced rates) it’s already been made clear that I’ll be right in the front line for tax rises because, you know, self-employed freelancers are all tax dodgers. And we’ll all be ‘employees’ too if the Govt gets its way, a status amply demonstrated by us sitting at home on our lavish £0 of employee benefits per month.
It’s not easy for anyone right now - even those lucky enough to have safe jobs and £2500 per month for doing sod all have probably taken a wage cut - but some of us have not so much fallen through the cracks as disappeared into a Grand Canyon of Government scapegoating.
Not much reward for 34 years as a law-abiding taxpayer. But ‘they’ve done their very best’ so that’s fine then.
And this is the situation for many, many people.
But of course, because one person has done alright out of it then that must mean that everyone is OK and the government has done a great job.
I've seen both sides. Some are absolutely coining it from qualifying for the schemes and still being able to work. Others have been left with nothing.
It was never going to be perfect, but it does grind my gears when people say "oh well I put a claim in and it was really easy" and presume that it's the same for everyone (especially the guy you quoted with his rubbish about banking records).
"Well I spoke to this bloke in a pub and he said........." the MOST annoying phrase for accountants.