Posts by dak 162 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2010
In a couple of weeks' time I will be starting back at the office I was in when Boris the Power-Crazed shut the country down. As it happens I was in their departure lounge anyway because they had blanket-banned all ex-IR35 contracts. I will be returning still ex-IR35 and on a considerably higher rate.
The point of this comment is that the office is 350 miles from my home and my work cycle will be what I was doing then - 8 days there, six days at home every fortnight. The site itself is a very attractive one, full of interesting and inspirational people, and I have always worked better when stimulated by good competition.
I simply don't see how any company can inculcate its corporate ethos into new hires when they are kept away from existing staff, and in time many companies will lose their corporate identities entirely.
Of course, for many of my former clients this will be a Good Thing.
I wrote a series of articles on just why CEST is a lamentably shoddy piece of work.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/critique-hmrcs-foia-response-1-david-kirkwood-msc-miet?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_pulse_read%3BEFOl1yohSrWKtsjHZcs%2B6A%3D%3D
In the next couple of weeks I will be returning to a client I left because of their IR35 blanket assessment. I will still be outside IR35, and earning more than I had been. The client will be paying a new intermediary about 50% more than in 2020 just to get me back.
Way back last century, the toolroom in the factory where I worked had a god-awful scheduling system and a very enthusiastic tooling engineer, who brought in a copy of Superbase and built his own system. It worked quite well for them and kept entirely under our radar.
We (DP) found out about it 55 weeks after it went live, and about 30 weeks after the engineer went on long-term sick. He had, of course, omitted a full date specification and the previous year's jobs were popping back up again. Could we please, fix it for them, please, please?
Of course, we couldn't, at least not quickly.
Part of the reason that it took a couple of weeks to alert us is that for a while the toolroom was legitimately quoting delivery dates into the factory in week numbers up to 66.
Oh, yes it is.
I bought one of these last week for my 92-year old neighbour. It was to replace an Alcatel which had recently in turn replaced his old Nokia which had died.
The Alcatel was rubbish and none of us could make it work properly. I switched the SIM and the Nokia burst into perfect life immediately.
Without any instruction, he sent his first ever text on Friday. It's a great little phone.
Hmmm...
IR35 was promulgated by a Labour Chancellor whose doctorate was in the history of the early Labour Party. It was introduced by "Red" Dawn Primarolo.
Its stated aim is to enforce fairness in the labour market. It has taken 22 years to implement, has been disastrous where it has already been implemented, doesn't work, can't work and will seriously distort and damage small businesses to no advantage whatsoever. It has been hammered through Parliament with no regard to warnings from multiple agencies.
Seems Socialist enough to me.
My MP assured me several times that he understood the issues and would support any measures to halt it. Then he voted against the amendment last night.
This will have a worse and longer-lasting effect on the economy than SARS Cov-2. At least that is going away now and the panic reaction by the Government was just that - panic. But IR35 is a definite course of action put in place by a 20th century socialist government and will be hindering business for a very long time.
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