POLITICS —— How can we address the underlying incentives that are driving what goes on in the labour market? According to Taylor, policy making is like being a “painter or a poet”. “You go into something with a set of skills and you look, and you search for inspiration to solve a particular problem and try to fine tune the product – that product is the policy recommendation.” Whether or not you agree with his analogy, Taylor certainly looked to address the issues he had identified – but was he successful? The review, published in July, called for “seven steps towards fair and decent work”. These recommendations included making the “taxation of labour more consistent across employment forms”; introducing a new dependent contractor status; and calling for the government to “explore ways to improve pension provision amongst the self-employed”.
“The common sense idea of what it means to be selfemployed is that you exercise a high level of control over the work that you do; so I wanted to put more emphasis on control”
Matthew Taylor put forward seven key recommendations in his review
produce an independent report. Leading this review meant that I was on the road, doing events, talking to the press… I had become a public figure.” Taylor admits that although he had been in talks with Downing Street about conducting a review – partly because the RSA had done some work on self-employment, gig work and the future of work – he was rather sceptical about it actually being done. “I suspected that it would never happen,” says the father of three, “my experience of the government is that people are always posting ideas but very few of them actually end up happening. But then I got a phone call to say it was going ahead and that was it.” When asked if he had any preconceived notions about the world of work that have changed following his research, Taylor claims there were none. In fact, he confidently says that “there were no huge surprises”. “There wasn’t some bit of truth or a bit of 10
reality that I was completely unaware of, that I suddenly had to confront. Nor was there one really big idea which I had never thought of.” The former Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) director goes on to explain his initial process going into the review and his anxieties about it one month in. “I felt that untangling this, setting up an approach and developing policy ideas was going to be very, very difficult given that it is such a complex set of issues. “I realised that this is not just about gig work, agency work or work in general. Once I’d got a handle on that, we were able to identify three broad areas to look at.” The three key areas he set out to address in his review included: —— Exploitation – who is being exploited; why they are being exploited; what can be done about it? —— Why is the system so confusing and complex and what can be done about it?
IPSE welcomed the review from the outset and backs many of the recommendations. However, it has questioned the new dependent contractor status, which is based primarily on control, adding that it could lead to greater confusion rather than simplifying the system. IPSE has long called for the government to bring in a statutory definition of self-employment based on a set of principles, which include day-today control of tasks, mutuality of obligation and the ability to substitute, to address this confusion. In response to this, Taylor labelled IPSE’s matrix “very interesting” and explains that his recommendation for a new dependent contractor status is “not new”, but falls within the worker category. “It felt to me in the end, the common sense idea of what it means to be self-employed is that you exercise a high level of control over the work that you do; so I wanted to put more emphasis on control and supervision. “This is, by the way, what HMRC use as their primary criteria for determining someone’s status. “I suggest that over time we move to aligning HMRC categories and employment categories.” This is one of IPSE’s long-standing recommendations. He went on to add: “I also wanted to address a particular problem, which some delivery companies are known to do. They use substitution as a kind of get out of jail card on workers’ rights and I don’t think they should do this. “The fact that you can get someone else to do your job for you, doesn’t change the nature of the relationship. The capacity for substitution might distinguish someone from a worker and an employee, but it shouldn’t be something that distinguishes a worker from a self-employed person.” ipsemagazine.co.uk