IR35 Tax Reforms

Anneliese Dodds Excerpts

Thursday 4th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) on securing this debate. It is also a pleasure to sit opposite the Minister. I had withdrawal symptoms after the end of the no-deal statutory instruments. I am afraid this subject has a similar level of complexity as the subjects we discussed in relation to no-deal preparations.

As many hon. Friends and Members have mentioned, IR35 arrangements are designed to operate in relation to workers involved in so-called off-payroll working. They cover situations where people work for a client through their own intermediary, often a personal service company. We have heard many examples in the debate. If people were providing their services directly, they would be classified as an employee. However, as a result of the arrangements, IR35 workers pay income tax and national insurance contributions in a different way to an employee. Individuals who work in such a manner benefit from increased flexibility and reduced tax liability, but the IR35 rules are intended to ensure that they pay broadly the same tax and national insurance contributions as an employee.

As we have discussed, the rules have applied to public sector bodies since 2017, and the Government confirmed at the 2018 Budget that they would extend the change to the private sector. The Government have just launched a technical consultation about the new arrangements.

Self-employment and contractual arrangements are a vital part of the UK economy. People who are genuinely self-employed deserve to be properly supported, while also ensuring that everyone pays the right amount of tax. However, there are real concerns that workers are being forced into self-employment by unscrupulous employers to avoid costs and their duties to workers. Both the law and the Exchequer are struggling to keep up on this issue—a point that has been made by various speakers today. HMRC estimates that it loses about £3 billion a year because of self-employment in name only.

There is a problem, but at the root of it is the gap between how work is characterised for tax purposes and how it is characterised for the purposes of employment legislation. The Taylor review was meant to clarify at least the latter, as was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) in a speech that was characteristic of all the speeches today when she spelled out the experiences of her constituents, and appropriately so. The Taylor review had many flaws. I will not go into all of them now, but it suggested that, for example, sick pay could be traded for a weakening of minimum wage rules—certainly not something that I would support—and that came at the same time as the courts were recognising that many alleged self-employed workers were anything but.

However, the review did offer a number of recommendations that the Government have sadly been extremely slow to consider. The lack of clarity over the implementation of Taylor where it is warranted is leading to a huge number of problems, including the ones we have talked about, for genuinely self-employed contractors and for what we might call bogusly self-employed contractors, as well as for their employers, as they adapt to coverage by IR35, knowing that even the IR35 rules may be subject to change because of future alterations to employment law in the wake of the Taylor review.

It looks as though we will not see an immediate change, so HMRC is engaging in a process of what I call bricolage to try to bridge the gap, and the consequences are complicated and very confusing. The confusion was described appropriately by my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), who talked about a constituency case. She was kind enough to share the details of the case with me before the debate. She was absolutely right to raise the concerns of her constituent.

[Ruth Cadbury]

May I clarify that it was not a constituency case? The case was raised with me as a result of the work that I did on the loan charge.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am grateful for that clarification. Regardless of where the individual was based in the country, the case was revelatory. In theory, with a levelling of the playing field upwards when the private sector is covered by IR35, some of the concerns about the leakage of highly skilled contractor staff from the public sector could be removed by the extension. However, the other problems that hon. Friends and Members have rightly referred to are still there, not least the problems that arise for small, often one-man or one-woman-band contractor companies that are trying to provide specialist skills on this basis, who may well end up being disadvantaged in relation to much larger providers of those specialist services. Surely we do not want that; surely we want to continue to have the innovation that exists in the complex ecology of different firms and freelancers offering such services.

We really need a joined-up approach to the issues that brings together the consideration of tax and employment law and levels up protections for the self-employed, as well as dealing with the current implications of the tax system that boost bogus self-employment. In the absence of that, we have the issues that we have been talking about today, and employers themselves are trying to find a third way through all of this, as we have seen with the GMB-Hermes deal recently, where a new employment classification has been created in the absence of any other way to improve the situation.

We do not have a coherent approach. It is unfortunate that, as Members have mentioned, the lessons have not been learned from the roll-out of IR35 to the public sector before it is rolled out to the private sector. I will not go through all of them now, as they were appropriately described by my hon. Friends, but one that I want to underline again is the concern about the finance and time that has to be spent by the self-employed who face uncertainty because of the new rules.

The kind of experience that individuals have had with the HMRC online tool, which has already been explained, is a common one. The tool is not based on all of the case law, and the case law itself is not very clear in how it directs us to determining the status of many different contractors, so it does not resolve the situation for many users. It puts an additional strain on contractors, including many individuals who, as has been mentioned, might be on quite low incomes and cannot absorb additional costs. The Government need to look at the issue at a legislative level, rather than the onus being on HMRC to try to deal with it in a technical and procedural manner. It simply cannot. A different approach needs to be taken. As we established in our previous general election manifesto, the burden of proof should be with the employer, so that the law assumes a worker is an employee unless the employer can prove otherwise. We need to be clear on that.

Concerns about the appeals process have been mentioned. I will not go into them in detail, but I will underline the questions asked by hon. Members. How can we be sure that the process will be fair when it is led by those who employ contractors effectively marking their own homework, in the memorable words of one hon. Friend?

The Institute of Chartered Accountants has stated that tax and benefit differentials between different types of work need to be addressed. There needs to be further consultation on what, if any, tax incentives are offered to the self-employed. That is one view from industry and it coincides with what was outlined in the Taylor report:

“Over the long term, in the interests of innovation, fair competition and sound public finances we need to make the taxation of labour more consistent across employment forms while at the same time improving the rights and entitlements of self-employed people.”

That brings me back to the fundamental issue that I will close with, Sir David.

It is a fact that the tax and legal status of work is not aligned, not certain and not comprehensible. It is impossible for many of those caught up in it to understand the right way forward. My party has said that we need a proper commission to look at it in detail, to modernise the law around employment status and to look at how it interrelates with tax status. We have presented a 20-point plan for security and equality at work. We need to build on that through a consultation that includes the voices of the people affected. We have heard so many of them in the short time that we have had today.

[Mr Sweeney]

My hon. Friend is making important points about the flaws in current thinking. With the consultation on expansion due to start in the next month or so, there is an urgent risk. Does she think we need to pause and reassess the roll-out before we blunder into it and cause much damage?

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am very concerned that the consultation is going ahead and that the whole process is continuing, because the consultation does not focus on the problems with the public sector roll-out. I would have anticipated that any consultation to expand the approach would take those issues on board. I hope the Minister will address that in his response, specifically why there has not been the necessary change of direction.

We may need legislative change, as I suggested, because of the lack of clarity, but we should not treat individual contractors as guinea pigs while it all gets sorted out, given the impact it could have on them. I look forward to the Minister’s response.