Far from being a homogeneous group, nine distinct segments of the solo self-employed workforce have been identified in new research published by the Centre for Research on Self-Employment, in partnership with IES. This segmentation furthers understanding of the solo self-employed population, including the levels of independence and security, and variation in earnings across this broad section of the UK workforce. The solo self-employed are those who do not employ other people and therefore work on their own account, and makes up 84 per cent of the self-employed workforce.

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The government should extend minimum wage legislation to protect some of the UK’s 4.8 million self employed workforce as part of its drive to tackle low pay and insecurity in the modern workforce, according to a new report published by the Resolution Foundation. The Minimum Required? – which forms part of the Resolution Foundation’s submission to the Taylor Review on modern employment practices – sets out a number of proposals to tackle endemic levels of low pay among the self-employed. Its new analysis claims that that while around in one in five employees are low-paid (earning less than two-thirds of typical weekly earnings), last year around half of the full-time self-employed workforce (49 percent) fell below this threshold, earning less than £310 a week.

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The self employed are turning to one another for business and financial support, according to new analysis by the RSA think-tank. Commissioned by the Federation of Small Business (FSB) to examine how self-employed workers might manage the risks they face, the RSA report claims that growing numbers of workers are turning to collective sick-pay funds to manage ill health, cash pooling schemes to deal with late payments and micro-loan services to plug gaps in bank finance.  The RSA’s report, The Self Organising Self Employed concludes that, to date, both the state and the market have struggled to keep pace with the rising numbers of the self employed. Although successive governments have been vocal in their admiration of people who strike it out alone, holding up their attributes as ‘self-starters’ and ‘strivers’, this had led to a ‘non-interventionist, hands-off policy agenda, with the self employed broadly left to their own devices’.

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New research from IPSE, the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed, claims that the number of solo self-employed people in the UK has fallen by 5 per cent compared to last year. The total number of solo self-employed (excluding those who have others working for them) has fallen from 4.6 million in 2019 to 4.4 million. Until now the sector had been growing continuously for 11 years – by a total of 40 per cent.   More →

A new report from IPSE (the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed) suggests that there has been a massive increase in the number of self-employed people on Universal Credit since 2019. More →