Author: Institute of Employment Rights
Date of Publication: 2021
Lord Hendy QC, who introduced the Bill, described its purpose as follows: “The bill is intended to deal with the problem posed by the current state of labour law which permits employers to classify workers into legal categories, many of which do not have the statutory employment rights which Parliament has stipulated employees should have. There are five such legal categories: ‘employees’ with full rights; ‘limb (b) workers’ with limited rights; ‘bogus self-employed workers’ with no rights; workers with ‘personal service companies’ with full rights but enforceable only against themselves; and, finally, the genuinely ‘self-employed’ in business on [their] own account with [their] own clients. The bill resolves this complex picture by designating all the first four categories as ‘workers’ with all statutory employment rights (subject to length of service qualifications). Only the fifth category will be unaffected. [View Resource]
