Andrew Dismore

So we see yet another Conservative broken promise in last week’s budget, with their raid on the self employed. Hot on the heels of the huge (and to many unaffordable) business rates hike, our self employed businesses now face a double whammy.
The Conservatives’ scheme is to increase their National Insurance contributions by 2%- yet they are not intending to increase the self employed’s access to contributory benefits in return. They have traditionally paid less, because they get less: no unemployment, sickness or maternity benefits, for example.
Self employment has grown in our economy: we welcome entrepreneurs, who take risks to set up new businesses, some of which succeed and generate more jobs for others – but we should remember many new companies also fail, too.
Others set up as self employed, not out of choice, but out of despair, because they cannot get regular employment due to the Government’s failure to provide the training and opportunities they need to succeed.
And of course there is the ‘fake news’ self employment- in the ‘gig’ economy, where companies like Uber argue that their workers are self employed, when to all intents and purposes they are really employees, as the Employment Tribunal has found.
If the Government want to generate more income they should take on these mega-multinationals. It means stopping the global companies’ crafty tax dodges. And this is not just limited to Corporation Tax avoidance.
Businesses like Uber should be required to treat their staff properly, by giving them the advantages of being regular employees, like sick and holiday pay; and these companies must also be expected to pay employers’ National Insurance contributions, which would give their workers access to contributory National Insurance benefits.
Tackling Corporation Tax and National Insurance avoidance would be a far better way to bring in more income than penalising the genuine , and often struggling, entrepreneurial self employed- those the Prime Minister claimed she would help: the ‘Just About Managing’, whom she is badly letting down.
This Conservative Government has always fought shy of going after the mega- multinationals, preferring to persecute soft targets like the self employed.

Andrew Dismore AM
Labour London Assembly Member for Barnet and Camden

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