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The brief debate in parliament (tinyurl.com/yakxasza) on the deferral of the introduction of the off-payroll working rules into the private sector highlights how tangled everything has become in the Covid-19 world, where those working through personal service companies have largely fallen through the gaps between the two main compensation schemes. There is no agreement about what the reforms do. From one perspective the rules are a necessary way of combating PAYE and National Insurance avoidance, from another they are an attack on the freedom of freelancers to operate in the manner which best suits them. A third view is that they are an attack on workers’ rights, because they treat freelancers as employees for tax purposes without giving them employment rights. I come at this from no particular perspective and I can easily be persuaded that any one of these views is correct.
We know the chancellor is looking at ways of equalising the tax, in particular National Insurance, burden between the employed and self-employed – this is one of the quid pro quos for introducing the support schemes. Given the fundamental changes that the crisis is bound to have on the economy and on the operation of labour market, is it too much to hope that we will finally get to grips with this issue properly? We need to find a way to create a system that reflects modern working patterns and achieves a real balance between the rights and obligations of different categories of workers. It is a tall order, but perhaps the current situation will be a game changer.
