In June 2020 a report by the House of Commons Treasury Committee (a cross-party group of MPs) highlighted how the measures put forward by the Chancellor Rishi Sunak to help employees and the self-employed through the lockdown left many missing out on income support.
Now the charity Pregnant Then Screwed (which supports, promotes and protects the employment rights of pregnant women and mothers) has been granted permission for judicial review against the Chancellor of the Exchequer for discriminating against women in the implementation of the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS).
Under the scheme, which opened on 13 May 2020 and has been recently extended until the end of April 2021, eligible self-employed individuals can receive a (taxable) grant of 80% of their average monthly trading profit over the last three years, capped at £7,500 in total for the period November 2020 to January 2021.
Pregnant Then Screwed claims that no less than 75,000 women have been negatively impacted by the eligibility criteria and calculation methods used by the scheme, which do not exempt periods of maternity leave taken between 2016 and 2019. As these are not discounted when calculating the average income, these women receive smaller grants than their peers. The charity argues that, as such, the scheme is indirectly discriminatory against self-employed women who have taken maternity leave.
The charity reports that, when asked to clarify why the Treasury had not exempted periods of maternity leave from the self-employment grant calculations, the Chancellor's legal team correlated maternity leave to a sabbatical or any other type of leave. The case is being listed for a hearing urgently.
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