Over 200,000 workers will be receiving a cheque of between €40 and €68 in the post over the course of next week as a tax rebate, Finance Minister Edward Scicluna announced on Wednesday.

The cheque will be sent by post to workers on 15 April, arriving over the course of the following week, and will be based on the tax declaration form filled up in 2018.  The lower the income of a person, the higher their rebate will be, Scicluna said.

This is the second such rebate in the space of a year and a budgetary measure.  It will cost the government around €11.5 million to fulfil, Scicluna said.

Such measures were part of the government’s commitment to reducing poverty.  Scicluna explained that this measure alone results in a marginal decrease of 0.17 on the poverty risk index, and added that combined with other measures – such as the increase of pensions, which alone decreased the risk of poverty for the elderly by 0.81 – the number of people at risk of poverty would continue to decrease.

Scicluna said that the number of people at risk of poverty had decreased every year, citing figures which showed that from 101,000 people at risk of poverty in 2013, this number had decreased to 87,000 by 2017.  The minister noted that he was confident that this number continued to decrease in 2018, and that the trend would also continue into 2019.