When You Are the Whole Business, Who Covers the Sick Day?

There is a particular kind of quiet in a town when its tradespeople are unwell. The plumber who does not answer his phone because he has done his back in. The taxi that is not on the rank because the driver is looking after a parent. The cleaner who cancels three households in a week and spends the next month apologising to each of them, because she cannot afford to lose the custom.

These are not unusual stories. They are the ordinary texture of self-employment in Britain as it is actually lived, rather than as it appears in a brochure about enterprise.

The blind spot in our own movement

For most of the last century, the labour movement's mental picture of a worker was a person on a payroll. That picture made sense when it was true. It is no longer true.

Self-employment now encompasses everyone from the scaffolder with two vans and a good order book to the parcel courier classified as an independent contractor, the freelance graphic designer, the mobile nail technician and the man who has driven a hackney cab for thirty years. Some are thriving. Many are one accident, one illness or one unpaid invoice away from real hardship.

If Labour is for working people, it cannot draw the line at people whose employer happens to issue a P60. A party that only speaks to payroll employment is a party speaking to a shrinking share of the workforce.

What the gaps actually look like

Three gaps stand out.

The first is sickness. Employees have statutory sick pay, modest as it is. A self-employed plumber does not. Take a fortnight off with a chest infection and you have simply not earned.

The second is retirement. Automatic enrolment has done real good for employees, but the self-employed have been largely left to their own devices, and the numbers saving adequately are stubbornly low. A pension is not a luxury; it is deferred wages.

The third is caring. Maternity, paternity and adoption support is patchy at best for those who work alone. A self-employed mother who takes six months off has not just lost income; she has often lost the client base she spent years building.

None of this is an argument for pretending that self-employment is the same as employment. The flexibility is real, and many who choose it value it. The argument is that risk should not be borne entirely by the individual when the shape of the economy is a collective choice.

Portable benefits: the practical version

We favour a portable benefits model, and we are conscious that the phrase has been used loosely. Here is what we mean by it.

A portable account, attached to the individual rather than the job, into which contributions are paid from earnings. A modest percentage, transparently deducted through the tax return or through digital platforms, accumulating across multiple clients and multiple years. The account would fund a defined set of protections: sickness cover, a pension top-up, and caring leave.

Crucially, the account travels with the person. A courier who moves from one platform to another, or a builder who takes a spell of PAYE work and then returns to self-employment, does not start again from zero.

We would also want a simplified social security deal: a contributory route to sickness and maternity support based on tax returns rather than a maze of separate claims, and a basic income floor test that does not treat modest self-employed earnings as though they were a full-time salary.

Delivered where people already go

A scheme nobody can navigate is a scheme that will not be used. That is why delivery matters as much as design.

Local business hubs, chambers of commerce, trade bodies and the taxi associations that already represent drivers on licensing matters should be funded to act as advice points. A self-employed worker should be able to walk into a familiar building, in their own town, and get a straight answer about what they are entitled to and how to claim it.

We would add a role for local councils, who already license taxi and private hire drivers and who know the shape of their local service economy better than any Whitehall department. Licensing should come with information, not just enforcement.

And there is a case for a single digital front door, so that a freelancer filling in a tax return can be prompted, in plain English, towards the protections they have paid for.

Fair rules for the people at the sharp end

The portable benefits debate cannot be separated from classification. Where a company controls the hours, the uniform, the route and the rate, and the worker has no genuine ability to send a substitute or set a price, the label on the contract should not determine the protections.

That is not an attack on enterprise. It is a defence of it. Genuinely independent traders lose out when competitors undercut them by misclassifying their staff.

A movement that counts everyone

There is a temptation in politics to describe self-employed workers as a constituency to be flattered rather than a group to be protected. We would rather be concrete.

Sickness cover for people who currently have none. A pension that builds without a payroll department. Caring leave that does not amount to a career ending. Advice delivered on the high street rather than in a portal nobody can find.

Those are the measures by which our towns will judge whether the language of fairness extended to them. A taxi driver on the rank, a builder with a bad back, a mobile hairdresser with a newborn — they are not asking for sympathy. They are asking to be counted.