Re: Good news and a triumph for common sense
The problem wasn't / isn't the individual contractors, it's always the hiring business doing it wrong. Rather than offering a contract to work on a problem and then continuously rolling it, the business should have discretely named projects which the contractor can work on, on a per project basis. My experience of this is that businesses are often too lazy (read: too disorganised) to plan that far ahead and organise things into project units, but ultimately the work I have produced in such environments could be broken down into individual projects. It's this lack of paperwork area that leads people into thinking contractors are doing it wrong, but the reality is that businesses bring in contractors for a reason, and that reason is usually the immediate skill availability. They just really suck at sorting themselves out; e.g. a 2 year transformation project has rolled into its 5th year, the business has 6 monthly budgets and the hiring team don't know if the money is there to keep them on and are tied with decisions, etc. When IR35 came in a great many businesses just changed all of their positions to umbrella or permanent, often with reduced overall tax payments when added up. This, coupled with the sudden drop in morale and COVID causing an absolute storm in the sector which, if you've looked at job boards recently you'll see still hasn't recovered, means that overall the IR35 reforms I suspect were a completely pointless exercise.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
