Mr. Liam Berney:

On platform working, there is currently a discussion taking place in the European Union around a directive on platform working and providing greater certainty for platform workers. A fundamental plank of that draft directive under discussion is criteria that would lead to the automatic classification of employee status as opposed to people being declared as self-employed. The approach in the draft directive is that there are a number of criteria, and if a person meets two of the criteria, he or she automatically is assumed to be an employee. There is an effort taking place specifically for platform working in the European Union to give greater certainty around employment classification for people who work as platform workers.

Looking at case law as it is developing across Europe, these platform workers are increasingly being found to be employees. There was the Uber case in the United Kingdom. There has been a case in the Netherlands where these platforms have been tested about their classification of workers and they have been found to be misclassifying them.

There is a road to travel around platform working and, ultimately, where it will end up. To some extent, it is old wine in new bottles because we have had a problem of bogus self-employment and misclassification of workers in this country for a long time and we continue to have it. It is evident in some sectors of the economy where the level of self-employment is much higher than the average in other sectors of the economy. The average rate of self-employment is between 10% and 13% whereas in some sectors it is has high as 30% or 40%. In some cases, it is even higher than that.

It is obvious why it is higher in some sectors. In construction, for instance, 30% of people are self-employed. We suspect most of those are misclassified as self-employed. The point Dr. Bambrick made about ensuring people who are self-employed without employees are within the scope of the scheme is important because, if they are not, it will add another incentive for employers to misclassify people as self-employed.