In the aftermath of Wednesday’s speech, Lewis said he heard floods of people facing homelessness after being ordered to wait until April to apply for the next program.

Martin Lewis put the nation’s questions to Rishi Sunak on Thursday, after the Chancellor made huge financial changes affecting nearly everyone in the UK this week.

The consumer expert challenged the Chancellor over the fourth and fifth self-employed income support schemes which he said would be launched later this year.

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s speech, Lewis said he heard floods of people facing homelessness after being ordered to wait until April to apply for the next program.

“The fourth self-employment grant will open from April,” said Martin Lewis.

“He will pay the same – 80% of the average salary, except this time the 2019-2020 tax returns will be included.

“Then there will be a fifth grant – which will be three months of average profit and available from July.”

This time it will depend on the takeover of the independent business, so anyone whose turnover has fallen by 30% or more will get the full grant, again accounting for 80% of the average business profit of three months up to £ 7,500.

A 30% grant will then go to anyone whose turnover has fallen by less than 30%, capped at £ 2,850.

“Why is the fourth grant not yet available? Lewis asked the chancellor.

“By April some people will be out of money, people told me they would be homeless by then.”

The Chancellor blamed the delays on the bureaucracy.

“There is a simple reason. If the grant covers the period from February to April, we will need to see their full income up to that period.

“This time we are also improving access to the grant, so we need tax figures for the years 2019-2020. Therefore, we need a little more time to process this.”

Lewis said: “Is there any chance you could consider bringing this date earlier?”

The Chancellor said HMRC is currently processing millions of claims – suggesting an earlier date is highly unlikely.

“The important thing is that we can process the millions of complaints and returns that we receive and to get the grants we need that time,” he said.

When asked if he would backdate support for people previously excluded from the program, Rishi Sunak said no.

“We should backdate everyone and that is just not possible,” said the Chancellor.

He was then asked why directors of limited companies are again excluded from the aid.

“Why the hell did you exclude directors of limited companies once again? We were on the brink and you just threw us over the edge,” Lewis said, reading a viewer’s question.

Sunak replied, “Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s fair to say that they are completely without support.

“There are so many different things we have done… mortgage leave and there are also all the other changes we have made to welfare.

“So there’s a lot going on there, but the simple thing with the directors, it’s been a real challenge and I, my team, my ministerial colleague have met with groups and looked at options and there is everything. simply no feasible option.

“I’m going to give you a statistic, Martin, I hope people watching and listening understand this, and that is that business owners, executives, there is no official definition of what it is. ‘is.

“We think and like you said, there may be around 600,000 of these people, but we don’t really know because there is no official way to find out and I’m going to tell you this, we get 3.3 million dividend tax returns.

“And we have no way of differentiating between the 3.3 million and the 600,000, if that is indeed the right number, so if we were to support it would mean that three out of four pounds of outgoing taxpayer n would not go to the right people.

“And that’s the challenge we were faced with and we just didn’t do it, there’s no way to reconcile those two things.”

We have a complete guide on how the two new SEISSs work, here.