Are we falling through the cracks?

The Labour Party Conference Leader's Speech today makes fascinating reading or listening, depending on how you access it, but one thing jumped out at me as being a significant change from the Labour Party. Labour has long been the party of workers, of employed people, springing as it did from the loins of the early trade union movement. Keeping those roots and that connection is important, but so is moving with the times, and recognising that the era of thousands of workers in massive plants in the UK has gone, and that many people in work are now employed in the service industries or in small businesses, or are self-employed people - who now make up around 14% of all people in work!

Whilst some people are self-employed out of choice, some are so of necessity. Some, like me, live in a rural area where there is not much work and where public transport costs are exorbitant. Some can work limited hours due to childcare issues, some cannot go out to work due to being a carer, or having a disability, or other health issues. That people are self-employed and therefore earning something has many benefits, not all of which are purely financial! Feeling that you can earn your keep, or a part of it, is good for your mental health too. Being able to structure your working hours round caring for your children, your elderly relatives, a disabled partner, all help ease the pressure on families under strain.

Over the past decade or so there has been a lot of encouragement for individuals to start their own businesses. For example, we have been told that the digital economy is growing. More and more shopping is being done online. A whole raft of public services are online. We have been encouraged to get online and do all sorts of stuff, and as a country we have done just that, with 89.90% of us with internet access. Figures from the Office of National Statistics (.pdf, 482kb) state that there are 4.6 million self-employed and sole traders in the UK. That's an awful lot of people who fall outside of the scope of the current welfare state!
Jeremy Corbyn's Leader Speech had this to say about self-employed people:

In my leadership campaign I set out some ideas for how we should support small businesses and the self-employed.  

That’s because one in seven of the labour force now work for themselves.  Some of them have been driven into it as their only response to keep an income coming in, insecure though it is.  But many people like the independence and flexibility self-employment brings to their lives, the sense of being your own boss.  And that’s a good thing.

But with that independence comes insecurity and risk especially for those on the lowest and most volatile incomes.  There’s no Statutory Sick Pay if they have an accident at work.  There’s no Statutory Maternity Pay for women when they become pregnant. They have to spend time chasing bigger firms to pay their invoices on time, so they don’t slip further into debt. 

They earn less than other workers.  On average just £11,000 a year.  And their incomes have been hit hardest by five years of Tory economic failure.

So what are the Tories doing to help the self-employed, the entrepreneurs they claim to represent?  They’re clobbering them with the tax credit cuts.  And they are going to clobber them again harder as they bring in Universal Credit.  So I want our policy review to tackle this in a really serious way. And be reflective of what modern Britain is actually like.

Labour created the welfare state as an expression of a caring society – but all too often that safety net has holes in it, people fall through it, and it is not there for the self-employed.  It must be. That is the function of a universal welfare state. Consider opening up Statutory Maternity and Paternity Pay to the self-employed so all new born children can get the same level of care from their parents.

I’ve asked Angela Eagle, our Shadow Business Secretary, and Owen Smith, our Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, to look at all the ways we can we support self-employed people and help them to grow their businesses.

This is such a significant statement for self-employed people like me. Although we pay our National Insurance contributions and our Income Tax like every other worker, we currently have no support  by way of sickness or maternity benefits. All we have is the red tape of being self-employed under a system designed for big businesses or employed people.  It's time for a change to iron out those discrepancies and to recognise, as Jeremy Corbyn clearly does, that self-employment is an important area that needs to be looked at in depth and some serious answers provided.