UK contractors and freelancers may very well be among a new class of entrepreneurs who are of the belief that the current economic landscape will soon be improving.
The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has issued a call to contract recruitment agencies, umbrella companies, and the clients they do business with to exercise caution when developing alternative worker policies.
Nearly 150,000 small businesses in the UK are facing fears that they may become insolvent if they cannot maintain their contracts with the public sector.
In a recent announcement by the Government, its Spending Challenge has borne fruit in that three ideas submitted to it through both public sector workers and members of the public will soon be implemented as new governmental policy.
Due to recently discovered errors, HMRC has sent out its first round of approximately 45,000 letters to taxpayers, potentially including umbrella company contractors, informing them that their taxes were wrong. The total number of letters sent out should top 6 million by the end of this year.
According to new data released from the British Chambers of Commerce, contractors across many UK industries may be in for some good news: the BCC predicts that British GDP will rise by 1.7 per cent this year and 2.2 per cent the following year.
New data collected by a recruitment financer has revealed that the most deleterious effects of the global economic downturn are still to come for small and medium sized businesses.
Financial recruiter Goodman Masson’s director Richard Hoar recently stated that the so-called banking “supertax” has not precipitated the mass exodus of financial services staff that industry experts had been fearing.
Umbrella company contractors should consider themselves lucky not to have to undergo the sort of company training that many PAYE employees undergo, which often has no underlying purpose.