Arts and Creative Industries: Freelancers and Self-employed Workers

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is an immense pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and to have the privilege of being the first to congratulate him on introducing this Question with such skill, knowledge, empathy and thoroughness.

In the short time I have, I will focus on one of the things he said: the way in which what we still think of as atypical jobs are ceasing to be atypical. I look at my children, who range in ages from five to 21, and I do not think that any of them will ever have a job as we understood that word in the 20th century. They are likely to go through life constantly reskilling and freelancing, and adapting to a rapidly accelerating technological revolution. We should not be frightened of that. I know that there is a great sense that AI will put everyone out of work, but that same argument has been made about almost every technological advance since the Industrial Revolution—and yet the number of jobs keeps growing. What it will do is fragment the labour market further; we will become more and more specialised as we are freed up from the current jobs we do to find much more niche employments.

The Government have been very slow to adapt to the consequences of that. We still have a set of labour rules, social security rules and pension rules that are designed for mass workforces, going back to Chamberlain’s Holidays with Pay Act 1938. However, that is not the world that our children are growing up in; it literally belongs to another century. Instead of looking at freelancers as some subset, we need to start thinking about whether this will be the future of the entire workforce and about how we need to change our fiscal and employment rules—starting with the abolition of IR35, which is the bane of every freelancer. I declare my interest as a freelance journalist.

I hope that one thing that will come out of this is that we do not end up with only state employees being outside this benign revolution. It is not a revolution we should fear; it is one that will create more wealth and liberate more talent, and Ministers should not stand in its way.