Contractors could be forgiven for seeing The House of Lords’ Select Committee on Personal Service Companies (PSCs) inquiry as futile, particularly given the dismissive and disrespectful government response.
But the underlying principle of challenging the status quo, and highlighting that there are issues to address, are important. They are an essential element of our democratic process that, whilst flawed, is still held to be one of the more effective on the global stage.
Key factors that impact on large sectors of the UK working population are often overlooked when developing policy. For centuries, and in a more formalised sense over the last 60 years, our workforce has been neatly divided in a way that it can be conveniently managed and taxed by successive governments.
Unfortunately, successive governments, their civil service, and even many business organisations just don’t get it. So, while it is getting tedious for us to reinforce the same messages, again and again, we do need to keep reminding others that things have changed:
Once upon a time there were workers in jobs (often jobs for life as long as people obeyed the rules rigidly). There were also bosses. And then there was a strange in-between world of the itinerant worker/unemployed and the self-employed. This transient world actually represented a large proportion of the UK workforce, while the self-employed were predominantly skilled and highly skilled tradespersons.
Fast-forward fifty years (or even one hundred and fifty years) and, fundamentally, that original model has not changed much.
Except for two key points that have blown the cosy old realities out of the water:
- Employees are no longer in jobs for life, or for most workers in anything that even remotely resembles the old-style work certainties of the 20th Century. Even the most highly skilled knowledge workers can expect to have several different careers in their lifetimes
- The self-employed population has exploded to include not just the old-style tradespeople, artisans and crafts people familiar over many centuries, but also a whole new class of knowledge workers.
It is also worth noting that in some knowledge-intensive sectors, like engineering, creative and publishing, the norm for at least two centuries has been for people to work on the freelance model, and not be employed.
Traditional workers in the trades, crafts and artisan arenas continue to underpin our economy, as do those in certain professions and creative sectors. But there are also new kids on the block: knowledge workers in fields such as IT, engineering, media, communications and specialised areas of management and business.
These ‘new’ knowledge workers are no less independent, and no more employed than the trailblazing engineers, publishers, plumbers, basket weavers, builders and others who have underpinned the UK economy for centuries.
So, back to the Lords’ PSC inquiry. Despite the government’s denial of the facts presented by experts in months of oral evidence, and thousands of pages of written evidence, this exercise has been hugely worthwhile.
It has finally captured on official record the extent and importance of the UK’s contracting sector and its workforce. This may currently be underplayed by a weak coalition and a strategically blind government, but it will be a powerful policy weapon to be employed on contractors’ behalf in the years to come.
On the painfully slow, iterative and circuitous route of policy, the Lords’ PSC inquiry is likely to be seen as a clear milestone leading to a positive final destination.