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Have you ever cleared out your desk and found something old which had slipped down the back of a drawer? It feels that something like this must have happened with employment status, where we have just seen the publication of the response nearly four and a half years after the consultation was launched. One of my colleagues asked whether this was the longest ever wait for a published response. I certainly don’t know of anything longer, though I suppose that there might be a proposal by Mr Gladstone gathering dust at the back of a Treasury cupboard awaiting a reply!
I got the sense of the government going through the motions here (see our coverage on page 8) and that the problem has been put back into the ‘too hard to deal with at the moment’ box. To be fair, much has changed since the consultation was launched – we’ve had the Supreme Court decision in Uber and we are grappling with what work patterns will look like in a post-Covid world.
But the problem of employment status is not going away, and every time the courts look at it more nuances seem to creep in. With the current favourite in the race to become the next prime minister quoted as saying ‘our tax system isn’t working, it’s too complicated, I would have a complete review’ perhaps there will be an appetite for radical reform. Employment status would be a good place to start, though any talk of simplicity always makes me worry that it will actually lead to greater complexity. Perhaps there is no answer and we are better off struggling with what we have got at the moment. Hilaire Belloc may have been right when he wrote ‘always keep a-hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse’.
If you do one thing...
This is your last opportunity to submit an entry for the 20,000th forum question (it must be received by 12 August: tinyurl.com/Taxation20k).
