2. Help for the self-employed: the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS)

Government statistics, published in May 2020, show that there were just over five million self-employed people in the first three months of 2020, over a million more than 10 years earlier. Although the self-employed include some well-paid professions, many more are relatively poorly paid and many have been badly hit by the collapse in economic activity as a result of the lock-down which followed the coronavirus outbreak.