Originally written by Chris Bryce on Small Business
The self-employed are one of the UK’s great economic success stories. As their numbers have shot up in the last ten years – from 3.8 million to almost 5 million – so too has their economic contribution (including tax).
Self-employed workers contributed £275bn to the economy in 2018 – enough to fund the NHS twice over. They also provide businesses across the UK with vital flexibility and specialist expertise.
Despite the crucial contribution of freelancers, however, the fact is that today they are being stifled by a tax system that just doesn’t work for them. The analogue and outdated tax system in the UK was built with just two groups in mind: employers and employees. And as the number of self-employed has grown, tensions have increased in this creaking system.
The problem is that instead of redesigning the tax system to work for the self-employed, successive governments have just tried to patch it up and retrofit it. The result is confusion and heavy-handed, damaging policies like the off-payroll working rules aka ‘IR35’.
The latest iteration of this cumbersome tax law is basically designed to force non-employees into the employee tax system. It’s a crude policy that has