False Self Employment Cost Economy £5 Billion

The Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform committee, has reported that The exchequer loses around £5 billion a year due to “bogus employment” in the construction industry.

The parliamentary select committee was meeting as part of its inquiry into the construction industry and heard that builders and other tradesman are often given no choice but to register as self-employed in order to obtain work.

The Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians (UCATT) claims the government loses at least £2.5 billion each year from missing National Insurance contributions alone. UCATT general secretary Alan Ritchie highlighted ‘bogus self-employment’ as one of the key challenges facing the industry and called on the HMRC to perform much more stringent checks on whether workers really were self-employed before allowing them to be taxed under CIS.

Around half the construction industry’s work force of over two million people are classed as self employed.