Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Peter Dowd and Damian Green

Monday 9th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

2. What recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of self-employment.

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Damian Green)]

The Government support those who aspire to be their own boss. The number of self-employed people in the UK labour market has increased by nearly 800,000 since 2010 and by 129,000 in the last year alone. We continue to monitor and review the impact of self-employment on the wider labour market and benefits system.

[Peter Dowd]

A Citizens Advice report in August 2015 said that there were as many as 460,000 people in bogus self-employment, with a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenue. Is it not about time that the Secretary of State, rather than hounding disabled people, started tackling exploitative companies, many of which have lucrative public sector contracts, that are forcing people down the self-employment route?

[Damian Green]

The hon. Gentleman is right that there should be no exploitation of workers, particularly through forced self-employment, but he will have noticed that the Government are on the case, having set up the Matthew Taylor review specifically to explore alternative employment structures and to consider how employment rules need to be altered to keep pace with changes in how people work in the modern economy. If, however, he is characterising the growth of self-employment as harmful to the jobs market, I would disagree. The new enterprise allowance is proving very successful at making sure that people who want to can work for themselves. I am sure that he, like me, welcomes the fact that in his own constituency self-employment is up by 7% since 2015, and that the claimant count in the last year has fallen by 12%.