The Self-Employment Income Support Scheme is one of the most generous COVID-19 support schemes in the world, but I have received complaints from constituents who do not qualify.

Individuals, including members of partnerships, were eligible if they had submitted their Income Tax Self-Assessment tax return for the tax year 2018-19, continued to trade, and had been adversely affected by COVID-19.

 Around 95 per cent of those with more than half their income from self-employment in 2018-19 may have been eligible for this scheme. It pays a taxable grant worth 80 per cent of the average monthly trading profits, paid out in a single instalment covering three months’ worth of profits, and capped at £7,500 in total.

Alternatively, those who paid themselves a salary through their own company, were eligible for the ‘furlough’ Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, available to employers, including owner-managers, and individuals paying themselves a salary through a PAYE scheme.

The main complaint I ‘ve been getting is that those people who pay themselves a dividend from their company rather than a wage, are not covered.

The difficulty is that incomes from dividends aren’t wages, they are a return on investment, and are taxed differently because of that.
Even setting aside this difference of principle, under current reporting mechanisms, it is not possible for HM Revenue and Customs to distinguish between dividends derived from an individual’s own company and dividends from other shares that they possess.

 
The Government did consider providing a new system for those who pay themselves through dividends, but this is much more complex. The information required by the other support schemes, is already held by HM Revenue and Customs.
A dividend scheme would require owner-managers to make a claim and submit information that HM Revenue and Customs could not efficiently or consistently verify to ensure payments were made to eligible companies, for eligible activity.
Some of my correspondents suggested that that a ‘pay now, but clawback later’ approach could have been taken, but that  would have required manual and highly resource-intensive procedures to ensure compliance, and there would still be a high risk that incorrect or fraudulent payments could not be recovered.

The proper recourse for those who do not qualify for the schemes is to fall back on Universal Credit, which has performed incredibly well, in paying out on time for a surge of millions of new applicants.

The difficulty is that you cannot qualify for Universal Credit it if you have savings of more than £16,000, and this is where the perceived unfairness lies. None of the Covid-19 schemes are subject to a savings threshold, so I can quite understand the disappointment of those who’ve worked so hard, but don’t qualify, and are now having to live off their savings, whilst others are receiving help.

Should the savings threshold have been raised, or suspended, during the pandemic?
It sounds easy, but it raises questions about hundreds of thousands of applicants denied Universal Credit because of their savings before Covid-19 even came along.
Does the very existence of a savings threshold discourage thrift by penalising the thrifty when they run in to hard times?
But then you wouldn’t want to see millionaires claiming Universal Credit even if they had lost their job.
Equally, one of the reasons that we save is for “a rainy day” as my Granny used to say. And isn’t losing your income that rainy day?

Nothing is simple, and nothing will ever be 100% fair

Earlier in the week I was lobbied by 30 or so constituents seeking more action on climate change.

Their principal request was for local empowerment so that communities could lead initiatives themselves. I agree. Of course, there is an agenda that Government must lead from the centre, but there is so much that can be done locally.
Our New Forest Communities are active in tackling the scourge of pollution, from litter picks, to recycling initiatives across the area,  to mass tree plantings on community land. This volunteering spirit reminds me of what we tried to foster a decade ago through the ‘Big Society’ which sought to give “communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.”
It is a force that we need to harness in order to drive forward change.
A good example of initiatives that we should be pursuing is in the Local Electricity Bill which is currently in Parliament. This will allow electricity to be generated locally and sold direct to households in the community. It is not only positive environmentally to harness energy locally but in an increasingly uncertain world it is also prudent in terms of energy security.

Making those households much more energy efficient is the natural partner to renewable electricity supply. The statutory requirements for The Future Homes Standard to reduce carbon dioxide emissions 75-80% don’t kick-in until 2025. I’d prefer it to be much sooner, but there is a cost involved, and we have yet to address how that cost is to be divided between the developer, the purchaser, and the taxpayer.

Inevitably the group raised the issue of litter and plastic pollution. I am all too familiar with it and I’ve used this column on before to draw attention to it. I am frustrated that, having concluded a consultation last year on a bottle recycling scheme, the Government has decided to proceed with yet another one next year before we see it implemented. Nevertheless, there has been some success with a 90% reduction in single use plastic bags. Again, I’ve used this column to point to the example of Rwanda where plastic bags are banned entirely -and they are doing just fine.
I also believe there is far more scope for regulation to reduce the obscene amount of packaging. I am glad that progress has been made on banning micro-plastics in cosmetics and the ban on plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds takes effect in October.
From  2022 products will be taxed that do not contain 30 per cent recycled materials.
I was happy to report that the leading campaigner on this agenda, Rebecca Pow, the MP for Taunton Dene, has been promoted to be the minister with responsibility for this brief.

There was a clear preference expressed by the group for more cycle-friendly transport policy. As a cyclist myself, I am glad that this has been part of the Government’s strategy: we can expect more cycle lanes when  the Prime Minister (himself a keen cyclist) announces a new cycling and walking strategy later this Summer.

We all agreed with each other that the move to electric vehicles required a transformation in the charging points available. Equally, we should congratulate local services like MoreBus: Their electric X3 from Salisbury to Bournemouth via Ringwood and Fordingbridge generates fewer emissions than my push lawnmower.

It was a useful and positive exchange, and it is essential that we keep it that way: I’ve come across far too much defeatism on climate change. It is not beyond our wit to reverse the damage that we’ve done to the planet, and to enjoy a better quality of life. The UK was the first developed country to impose legislative targets to reduce our emissions, since when we’ve met those targets and reduced emissions dramatically. There is plenty more for the Government to do, for local communities to do, and for each and every one of us to do.

When he announced reductions in the Coronavirus lock-down measures last week, I asked the PM , that even when there are flare-ups in the disease, if he would resist the temptation to return to ‘collective punishment’.

Interestingly enough, in the USA  the infection rate has continued to surge ahead, nevertheless their death rate peaked in April and has fallen dramatically ever since.
So, is the virus becoming less virulent?
Or, is more testing just identifying more cases?
Or is the disease being treated more effectively?
Certainly, the adoption our own UK breakthrough with Dexamethasone will lead to an even lower death rate.

At any rate, if lock-down was our original concept of a ‘cure’ for the disease, we now have to seriously ask ourselves whether this ‘cure’ is now doing more damage to not just our economic welfare , but also to our physical and mental health than the disease itself.

The reductions announced on Wednesday are welcome, but as I pointed out the PM at his previous statement on 16^th June, there will be no economic recovery until we can jettison unnatural social distancing altogether. Of course, a yard is much easier to cope with than 2 meters but many drinkers will bridle at having to give their name and contact details to order a pint of beer.
Masking-up and standing in line is not what I consider to be retail therapy. Retail has to have an ‘offer’. We’ve all discovered that you can make purchases cheaper and more conveniently online. So, if we are to save our high streets, shopping will have to return to being a superior social experience, otherwise why would we bother making the effort.
In any event we are we are still a very long way from restoring normal economic activity. Swimming pools, Gyms, theatres, live concerts, beauty salons (despite a huge investment in PPE by many of them) all remain closed to us.
I accept that we are more than economic beings and I am delighted that the Churches are to restore public worship. But we are not to be allowed to sing. Will they fill the time with longer sermons?
That is unlikely to draw many of us back, having broken the habit.

I am tired of listening to pundits on the wireless, boring the socks off us all, as they bang on about how life is going to have to change for good (-no more kissing  being the very least of it).
Don’t these puritans realise that most of us want to get back to normal, and not some concept of ‘the new normal’.

The only way back to normal is when we overcome our fears and begin to treat Covid-19 as just another of life’s hazards, like catching the flu or having an accident.
We aren’t there yet, give the medics a bit more time for a vaccine and cures, and we will get there. In the meantime, we all need to practice, as far as we are able, behaving a bit more normally.

And NO return to collective punishment.

I count my sojourn as Minister of State for International Development as the most productive and useful of my time in Parliament. I was very sorry to be sacked, but then, one might say ‘I had it coming’. I certainly expected to be one first casualties of Theresa May’s premiership given -what they call in the trade- my “previous” (when I was David Cameron’s parliamentary secretary I twice tried to persuade him to sack her).

It was a privilege to have worked in an organisation that has justifiably acquired a tremendous reputation and respect throughout the international community.
It is staffed by dedicated and amazing people that have achieved tremendous results.
I have no doubt that the UK’s continued place at the top table in the counsels of the world owes much to expertise and professionalism of DFID.

I will wager that, of all the ‘wasted aid’ scandals that have so driven the readers of the Daily Mail into a state of apoplexy over the last decade, 99% of them will have been projects initiated and managed by the Foreign Office and not by DFID.
It is vital that this reorganisation in Whitehall is a genuine merger, and not an hostile takeover.
The influence and ethos of DFID needs to be extended within the new organisation and its management standards applied to the whole foreign aid budget.

The UK Aid brand will sustain some damage by the perceived loss of independent action. To minimise that damage we must maintain the current statutory requirement that foreign aid expenditure has to be for the relief of poverty. Equally, we must abide by the manifesto commitment not to tie aid to trade. We should continue to promote the trading abilities of the world’s poorest countries as part of our main effort, but we must eschew the example of so many other donors who see their development aid as a ‘loss-leader’ for their export drive.

Nevertheless we have to accept that official development aid is not charity.
Charity is when you dip your hand into your own pocket and distribute the contents without any expectation of return.
Development aid however, is extracted from our pockets with all the coercive force of the law. It is taxpayers’ money to be spent in the national interest. It is an investment from which we do indeed expect a return: it is our investment in a more stable and peaceful world in which we can be secure and prosper.

We cannot complain about the unsustainable wave of migration heading across the world unless we are prepared to invest in security and sustainable livelihoods in the places from which people are migrating.
I hope that this will be the focus of the new organisation.

Last week I was deluged with email messages for having called out rioters, looters and arsonists, but this week I’ve been inundated with messages demanding more robust police action against marauding mobs that are defacing public monuments.
Constituents have expressed their anger at watching the Police standing by (or even kneeling). My solidarity however, is for the vast majority of our police who have a very difficult balance to strike and end up being seriously injured for taking the trouble.

Values and standards change, and every generation has the right to reappraise the actions and attitudes of its predecessors, and that this might even extend to the removal of monuments if that is done by consent and lawful means.
What is completely unacceptable is to have people taking things into their own hands.
There is a proper democratically controlled planning process for the removal of listed monuments and changing the name of a street requires the formal consent of two-thirds of local taxpayers who reside in it.

It is a measure of the mindlessness of the mob that they take out their anger on monuments rather than put their energy into addressing, through our democratic system, the injustice of which they complain. The truth is that these anarchists have no interest in consent and democratic politics, like the fascists from whom they differ so little, they want to impose mob rule without consent.
The attacks on the Cenotaph and on the statue of Sir Winston Churchill show that the mobs are determined to outrage public opinion.

Our history over centuries is bound to have thrown up both great achievements and terrible horror stories.  As Historic England puts It
“We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations. They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong. But those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.”
I’d put it a little stronger: seeking to erase the past in this way is no better than Daesh when it destroyed the standing Buddhas in Afghanistan, and ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria.
If we followed the absurd mindset of the mobs we’d erase every remaining trace of Roman civilisation in the our Island and the Egyptians would tear down the pyramids.

Some of the emails to me have been so despondent about mob behaviour that I have had to try and cheer them up. I tell them that the hysteria will pass, it usually does.

Next Week The Commons will debate the second reading of the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill.
For Those of us who believe in the fundamental importance of marriage as the basis for family life -and all the implications for a strong and stable society that flow from it, making divorce easier will always be a difficult subject and I’ve been receiving large numbers of representations.

The principle of the bill is to remove ‘fault’ from divorce.
Under the current law, anyone seeking to divorce must initiate proceedings against a spouse,  citing one or more of five ‘facts’ :adultery; unreasonable behaviour; desertion, separation of two years where both parties agree that the marriage is irretrievably broken down; or 5 years separation if one of the parties disagree.
If one of these facts is proved, then a court must grant a divorce to the petitioner.

The new bill dispenses with these 5 facts and by doing so removes the concept of fault or blame.
Under these proposals all that either spouse need do is present a statement that the marriage has irretrievably broken down and the court will accept it as conclusive.

Notwithstanding, that I do believe that there is indeed blame and fault in divorce, I can accept the principle of the bill because, in my experience, the process of attributing blame by raking over the adultery or detailing the unreasonable behaviour, is itself bound to generate greater bitterness and hatred. I have witnessed parents using their children as weapons in a continuing war with their former spouse, as a consequence of the lasting anger and bitterness of such a divorce process.
Removing the need to attribute fault will not remove the pain and bitterness of divorce, but my belief is that it will be less likely to stir it up.

Where I do depart from supporting the measures in this bill however, is that it introduces an overall timeframe of 6 months from the application for a divorce, to the granting of it. This is ridiculously short. You might even describe it as ‘drive-thru’ divorce.

Currently many more couples explore the possibility of divorce than actually proceed to obtain one. In the intervening period there is an enormous opportunity for guidance, counselling and reconciliation.  The proposal to reduce the divorce process to a mere six months removes so many opportunities for reconciliation and suggests that divorce is an easier option and a quick way out.

Actually, divorce is the swiftest route to poverty. Of all the difficulties that constituents bring to me in the hope that I can be of assistance -irrespective of how the problem presents: whether it be debt; housing, insufficient income, schooling, child access, or whatever. When I scratch the surface, I find that divorce and family breakdown are the real root cause.
This bill will generate more of it.

I have had a large correspondence about Dominic Cummings, overwhelmingly hostile with only about 25% in support of his actions and determination to remain in office.
I have hitherto responded  by saying that I will pass the views expressed on to Number 10.

I understand the indignation and genuine disappointment evident in much of my correspondence from people who have often, at great personal cost, observed the lockdown  and now perceive that, despite that sacrifice, there was one rule for them and another for the powerful –and that is the essential charge, with I must address.
(Far too much of the correspondence however, has been filled with bile, sarcasm and hatred. As for the media coverage, there is nothing less edifying than the public demonstrations of the self-righteous.)

Anyone who has followed my blogs and my speech in Parliament will have realised by now that I was deeply opposed to the lockdown in the first place. I believe that it will have significantly added to the economic damage that the virus has inflicted, and I believe that it is an affront to our liberty.
So much of the correspondence that I have received reinforces the lockdown’s cruelty in preventing people visiting loved ones, when -in my estimate- sensible precautions would have enabled them to do so with very low risk.

From the outset people have sought my advice. Now, generally, whilst I’m happy to give an opinion, I don’t give advice: I point out that I’m not qualified to give advice, and that I don’t have professional indemnity insurance for when it turns out that I’ve given bad advice.
During the lockdown however, I have abandoned that caution. It was clear that there was a significant difference between public perceptions of the demands of the lockdown regulations and what the regulations actually state, a difference often reinforced by guidance given by officials.
I sought to be helpful by publishing the regulations on my website.
I was then besieged by requests for advice from people genuinely struggling to understand  how their needs were affected. Principally, their enquiries were about whether they were permitted to continue working, but they covered the whole range of activity from where they could exercise and how often, even could they still move house. I was happy to accommodate them by pointing where they could use their discretion and common sense in interpreting the rules and the guidance.
Then, someone facing a dilemma somewhat similar to that faced by Dominic Cummings asked for my advice, and I told him that what he proposed to do, seemed reasonable to me in the circumstances -particularly so, given the guidance of the Deputy Chief Medical Officer at the daily press conference on 24th March.
So, on the central charge of one rule for Cummings and one for the rest of us, I cannot condemn him.

Since the very beginning of the Corvid19 outbreak, constituents have been writing to me demanding the quarantining of all overseas travellers, and many more demanding a ban on passengers from overseas entirely.

I disagreed. First, because my email inbox was daily being filled with desperate constituents who had been on holiday or working abroad and were then having tremendous difficulty trying to come home.
The last thing I would have wanted to do, was to lobby ministers to close the airports to make it even harder, or even impossible for them to get back.
Second,  scientific modelling predicted that once the disease was already spreading in the UK, restricting air travel would make little very difference -perhaps slowing the progress by only some three to five days. (In fact, Italy was first-off-the-blocks to impose an early ban on all flights from China but that did not alter the severe spread of the disease there).
The reality was that once the disease was spreading in the UK, travellers from overseas would be as likely to catch it here as they were to have brought it with them

Of course, had we been a remote Island with a small population and had we shut down flights at the very outset, as did New Zealand, then we might have fared as well as they have done. But the UK is not in a remotely similar position to New Zealand, on the contrary, we are the very centre of international finance and culture. We simply could not have acted in that way in time to contain the disease

As the rate of spread in the UK now diminishes and the number of new infections and hospitalisations falls sharply, is it now the time to impose quarantine to prevent infected travellers from re-seeding a renewed spread in the UK?

Clearly, there is some logic to this, but -like the lockdown itself- such actions come at a cost.
I have already used this column to point out that a severe recession will not be avoided even had we carried on without restricting commercial and social activity whatsoever. This is because we would still -as a trading nation and financial centre, have been hit by the shock to the world economy. In addition, the change in consumer behaviour – already responding before the lockdown, would have been even more pronounced as the disease spread.
Sweden avoided a lockdown but is not going to avoid a sharp recession.

Now however, just as we are trying to re-start our economy and mitigate some of the consequences of the damage that has been done to it, is this the time impose a severe restriction on commercial and holiday travel?
We need to be sending the world a signal that we are open for business, but we appear to be doing the very opposite. I know a number of businesses locally that will be further damaged: the imposition on their contractors working on short but important trips to the continent will be very costly.
Let alone the enormous damage that further reductions to inbound tourism will have on our earnings.

I believe that the blanket quarantine decision is a huge mistake and ought to be replaced by the sort of sophisticated airport testing regime which we have now developed, but was simply not available anywhere at the outset of the pandemic.

For the last week we have now enjoyed the benefits of voting in Parliament from the comfort of our own homes, one could even do it without getting out of bed, such is the convenience of modern technology.
To be fair, it does take just a little bit of getting used to: the Chancellor managed to vote against the Government in a division last week by pressing the wrong button, but I’m sure he’ll get the hang of it soon enough. It wouldn’t have happened in a physical division because a Government whip would have been barring the way.

When I was first elected in 1997 there was a huge influx of new MPs, partly because there had been an unusually large retirement cohort, but more so because of the huge Labour landslide wiping out so many previously safe Conservative seats. The result was a great deal of overcrowding in whichever division lobby the Labour Party happened to be voting in -whether it was ‘aye’ or ‘no’ the crush was just the same.

With so many new MPs not having experienced this crowded and prolonged voting system previously, there was an immediate demand to move to electronic voting.
A new committee was set up to examine the possibilities: The Select Committee on Modernisation.
It took some 18 months to produce its report, but by then it fell on deaf ears.
The new MPs had by then had quite long enough to grow used to voting by filing into separate lobbies and being marked off by the  division clerks as they emerged. More importantly, they had had long enough to appreciate the huge advantage of being often able to rub shoulders with colleagues and senior ministers, even the Prime Minister himself.
This is the huge advantage of the Westminster way of voting: it provides the opportunity to exchange information and grab the attention of the key decision makers where they cannot get away, and they are unprotected by officials and spin doctors. An enormous amount of important business takes place in the division lobbies.

What we managed to see off for years with the Committee on Modernisation, has been achieved in mere days by Covid19: we now have a fully functioning electronic voting system, and even if you are physically present in the Chamber of the House of Commons when a division is called, you are not now allowed to go into the lobbies to vote: you have to go to a PC, IPAD, or smartphone to record your vote.
This system is, of course, only a temporary expedient during the Covid19 pandemic, but these temporary things have a habit of surviving. How convenient to vote from home and not to have to trouble yourself with travel to London at all, and just think of the savings.
Already there are rumblings from MPs from more distant constituencies, and those with young families, and with private commercial interests which demand their time and presence.

My fear is that some newer MPs have not been in Parliament long enough to have fully appreciated the importance of the lobby voting system to their effective performance as an elected representative. After, all they were only elected in mid-December, then there was Christmas and not a great deal of voting in the weeks thereafter, and hardly time to settle into their role before the ‘virtual Parliament’ was imposed on us.

The battle over this ancient, but vitally important Parliamentary procedure is looming

Since the advent of the Covid19 pandemic the Government has always based its policy on the scientific advice that it has sought. Last week I listened to an interview on the wireless with Lord Howard a former Home Secretary and a former leader of the Conservative Party (whom I served as parliamentary private secretary during that period of leadership) and for whom I have enormous respect. He insisted that the Government was relying on the ‘best’ scientific advice.
How does he know, and can we be sure?

Certainly, there is no shortage of scientific advice, often contradictory advice. How are we to judge whether we have been led by the ‘best’ advice or by deeply flawed advice?

I am nervous about the extent to which the Government appears to have relied on advice from Professor Neil Fergusson’s modelling of the pandemic. Although he has now resigned from the Government’s scientific advisory group following the exposure of his lover’s breaking of the lockdown rules, it was apparent nevertheless that he had very significant influence at a key moment.
His computer modelling predicted that some half a million deaths would result from the our earlier voluntary approach to social distancing and reliance on building up a herd immunity in the population. That devastating prediction prompted a rethink from which the current policy of lockdown was the result.

There are plenty of scientific voices that reject Ferguson’s methodology and his assumptions.  At the time of his prediction his computer model had not been released for peer review. The code has now been made available to the scientific community and is subject to some pretty critical commentary.
I am not qualified to comment on the validity of the criticism of the computer code that he has released.
What we non-scientists can appreciate however, is that Professor Fergusson ‘has form’: He predicted that 136,000  of us would die of mad cow disease; that 200 million worldwide would die from avian flu. The reality however, was deaths of a few hundred in each case. 
In the current pandemic his model has been used to predict the deaths that would have resulted from the Sweden’s comparatively relaxed social distancing policy up until the beginning of this month. The result was predicted deaths 15 times greater than the actual number of deaths.

The pandemic’s damage to our livelihoods could not have been avoided, not least because we are a trading nation and the effect on international markets has been severe, nevertheless the policy of lockdown has imposed severe additional damage to our economy and costs that we will have to bear for many years. It was done for the best possible motive -to save lives.

Recession and unemployment also take a heavy toll of life too