Universal Credit to help them get by. According to a House of Commons Library paper written in January 2021, in the four-week period ending on April 9 (the very early stages of the pandemic), 1.
2 million people in Great Britain began a Universal Credit claim – and Gemma Oaten was one of them. ‘The worst time was at the start of lockdown 2020’, she told This is Money, Mail on Sunday. ‘I was on tour, doing a play called Ten Times Table by Alan Ayckbourn.
It was cancelled and, like many people in the industry, I got no compensation. All the theatres were closed, the TV studios stopped producing, and I had no money coming in.
People think if you’ve been on television, you must have money. But I was renting, and I started having sleepless nights about my bills.