Self-employed workers from supply teachers to party magicians have pleaded with the government to fill the hole left by earnings lost due to coronavirus. Self-employed people who have seen their earnings evaporate in a matter of days have been offered benefits worth £94 a week. By contrast, employees who are told they cannot work because of the need to self-isolate will be paid 80% of their normal wages up to £2,500 a month. Jim Campbell, 48, a magician in Edinburgh, worked his last job, a baby shower, 10 days ago and hasn’t been employed since. He said he felt angry when the UK’s 5 million self-employed workers were not covered by last Friday’s announcement that employees would still be paid if they couldn’t work. “By the end of February, bookings were going down and I started panicking quite a lot,” he said. “I was having panic attacks and outbursts at meetings due to extreme stress.” Last year he earned £14,000 and he has outgoings of around £1,000 a month. He has a credit card with a balance of £8,500 that is currently accruing no interest but will start charging him 24% in June. “They are giving us £95 a week,” he said. “And universal credit is not an easy system to work out. [Giving us a] basic income would show we are all in this together. If not, it is unthinkable the impact this is going to have on so many people, their health and their mental health.” On Tuesday the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, told parliament that the government was determined to find a way to support the UK’s5 million self-employed workers but said it could take time to implement a scheme “in a way that is deliverable and is fair”. Helen Denny, 42, another member of the self-employed workforce that makes up 15% of labour in the UK, said she needed support urgently. In the space of a week all of her work for the foreseeable future has been cancelled or postponed. She has gone from earning £300 a day as an adviser to companies on flexible working patterns, to being offered that much per month on benefits. She lives on a boat and is worried about whether she can pay the mooring fees. A plan to save for a flat has been shelved. “We don’t know where our next pay cheque is coming from,” she said. “I know a lot of other freelancers and self-employed who are in the same boat, who again have lost all their work overnight. With so much uncertainty it’s really hard to know when that work will reappear. There is a massive part of the population that has been overlooked.” Responding to growing pressure from across political parties and thinktanks including the Basic Income Conversation, Sunak told the House of Commons on Tuesday: “There are genuine, practical and principled reasons why it is incredibly complicated to design an analogous scheme to the one that we have for employed workers, but … rest assured that we absolutely understand the situation that many self-employed people face at the moment as a result of what’s happening and are determined to find a way to support them.” Rachel Reeves, the Labour chair of the Commons business select committee, has written to the business secretary, Alok Sharma, calling for ministers to extend the income protection scheme to cover the self-employed and to increase the rate of statutory sick pay. Len McCluskey, the leader of the GMB trade union, said: “Without swift clarity for millions of insecure and uncertain workers about whether they can be at work or not, and without removing the agonising choice between health and hardship, then the positive measures announced by the chancellor last week will be overshadowed and public health efforts will be severely compromised.” In Bristol, Laura Hughes and her partner, Ollie Hunt, both 27, exemplify the stark contrast between the treatment of self-employed and employed workers. Hughes, a supply teacher who works through an agency, has heard nothing about pay apart from the prospect of universal credit. “I haven’t been offered any support yet,” she said. “Agency work seems to have dropped off the radar, yet masses of people work like this.” By contrast, Hunt, an employee at a city centre bar and restaurant, expects to receive 80% of his income as part of the government’s initiative announced last Friday for furloughed workers. “The government will have to return to the idea of universal basic income, as it remains the quickest and fairest way to give security to those who need it most,” said Michael Pugh, director of the Basic Income Conversation. “This crisis has exposed just how many gaps there are in our social security system, and basic income should be the bedrock of our economic recovery in the weeks and months ahead.”