The House of Commons Work and Pensions and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committees (the Committees) made recommendations in November 2017 for addressing the issues raised in the Taylor Review. These included:
- Clarifying the employment status test in legislation and introducing a presumption of worker status for non-employees.
- A premium minimum wage rate for those on zero-hours contracts.
- Reform of the rules on continuity of service.
- Ending the Swedish derogation for agency workers.
- Greater financial penalties for rogue employers.
The government responded to these recommendations on 7 February 2018 – please click here to see our blog post relating to this. On 27 March 2018 the government wrote to the Committees setting out further detail on how it intended to implement the actions that it was to take forward in response to the Taylor Review. The Committees published the government response this week.
This week’s response does not add much to the response that was published on 7 February 2018, but acts as more of a formality intended to address the particular suggestions raised by the Committees in their report. The bulk of the response refers to further consultations and other measures that were announced in February, of which we are yet to see anything of substance.
This therefore leaves businesses in a state of uncertainty as to worker status, particularly for those operating in the gig economy. If the government does not get a grip on this issue and legislate for the same, businesses will be left looking to case law judgments to regulate themselves.
