Mr. Niall Cody:

It is interesting, and the Chair would be surprised about this, that when we deal with people on contract of and contract for, generally, there are employees, if I may use that term, who want to be self-employed and there are others who want to be employed. Our challenge is to deal with the contractual arrangement. The flat-rate scheme is part of the withholding system that was used in 1997. It was to give effect to the fact the self-assessed taxpayer would have expenses in the normal course and this was a simplified system to try to make sure they were in the tax system. It was also in the background where the determination in the sector had been that these people were self-employed from a social protection perspective. That was the environment. I was looking at the papers on this going back to the 1980s. It was a challenging sector at the time. The system has moved on. Secure email and so on has had an impact on the use of motorcycle and cycle couriers.

It is not all-pervasive. Van couriers, in the context of e-commerce, are the growing thing. I was looking at statistics yesterday in the context of using the NACE code couriers are in and the ratio is about 3:1 of employees to self-employed.