As promised in the Autumn Statement, the Budget in March has confirmed that there is to be a move against bogus self-employment in the construction sector, in spite of a rearguard action by the UK Contractors Group to have the proposals delayed because of the drag they will be on economic recovery.

Details of the proposals will be included in the Finance Bill that is put before Parliament after the Budget statement.

The Treasury estimates that 300,000 workers in the construction sector are in bogus self-employment, avoiding tax and National Insurance contributions due under PAYE and costing HM Revenue & Customs more than £380million a year.

The target this time is particularly people supplied by agencies or middlemen.

This is not the first time a government has tried to remove bogus self-employment from the construction industry. It has been an on-going battle for decades. The Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) was supposed to tackle it when it was introduced in November 1999, delayed from its intended launch in August because so much of the industry had ignored it, even though they were supposed to have been preparing for it for four years.

At first, there was a move towards directly employing people who had been self-employed under the previous 714 Scheme, but it did not last long and soon the industry moved back towards self-employment as a way of reducing the cost of a fluctuating workforce.

In 2007, changes were made to CIS to try again to stop bogus self-employment. The changes were supposed to have been implemented a year earlier but, again, had been largely ignored by the industry, leaving the Revenue little option but to delay implementation.