Work dilemma, need advice

ssdkck

My partner is a CIS electrician who was working on a building site, the site was shut down a week ago and now the agency have informed him that the site will possibly re open tommorrow.  His not keen on going back as the site had over 100 people working on it and being a smoker who had a collapsed lung 3 years ago his worried. We only have my income at the moment so will struggle financially. Does he work or claim the self employment grant?   Will he still be entitled to the self employmemt grant if he continues to work? 

Hermann

The current guidance is.... 

You can apply if you’re a self-employed individual or a member of a partnership and you:

• have submitted your Income Tax Self Assessment tax return for the tax year 2018-19
• traded in the tax year 2019-20
• are trading when you apply, or would be except for COVID-19
• intend to continue to trade in the tax year 2020-21
• have lost trading/partnership trading profits due to COVID-19

Your self-employed trading profits must also be less than £50,000 and more than half of your income come from self-employment. This is determined by at least one of the following conditions being true:

• having trading profits/partnership trading profits in 2018-19 of less than £50,000 and these profits constitute more than half of your total taxable income
• having average trading profits in 2016-17, 2017-18, and 2018-19 of less than £50,000 and these profits constitute more than half of your average taxable income in the same period

If you started trading between 2016-19, HMRC will only use those years for which you filed a Self-Assessment tax return.

SuperWizard

First of all, I recommend using the self employment tax status checker on GovUK (you'll have to Google it as I can't post links yet) to see if he would be considered self-employed or not since it sounds like he might be considered a "worker" here.

The criteria for the self-employment grant is:

You can apply if you’re a self-employed individual or a member of a partnership and you:

• have submitted your Income Tax Self Assessment tax return for the tax year 2018-19
• traded in the tax year 2019-20
• are trading when you apply, or would be except for COVID-19
• intend to continue to trade in the tax year 2020-21
• have lost trading/partnership trading profits due to COVID-19

Your self-employed trading profits must also be less than £50,000 and more than half of your income come from self-employment. This is determined by at least one of the following conditions being true:

• having trading profits/partnership trading profits in 2018-19 of less than £50,000 and these profits constitute more than half of your total taxable income
• having average trading profits in 2016-17, 2017-18, and 2018-19 of less than £50,000 and these profits constitute more than half of your average taxable income in the same period

If you started trading between 2016-19, HMRC will only use those years for which you filed a Self-Assessment tax return.

If he continues to work and he is deemed to be self-employed, he might struggle to prove that he's "lost trading profits due to COVID-19". If he is concerned about working with his health conditions—and he would otherwise meet the criteria—it might make sense to stop working, and claim the grant although it won't be paid out until June.

Hermann

Bear in mind the guidance is just to determine those who are eligible to apply, that does not guarantee you qualify for payments.

Those eligible will receive a form to fill out to determine if they qualify for a payment. We don't know whats on that form as it's not published yet but seems reasonable to expect it to include something on loss of trade due to COVID-19.