Sadly

[JoM]

All the best Suff, hope something suitable soon comes along for you. You're right to do this though, put yourself first for a change.

[Suff]

Thanks guys I appreciate the sentiment.

Ossie is right, that is how "people" and the governments want to view the independent contractor.

However there is another viewpoint to this. Whilst you might work at a company for one or two years, a lot of contractors bring skills which are not easy to come by. For instance I specialise in migrations and upgrades. These come around about once ever 5-7 years, depending on the company cycle for upgrades. Where we fill the slot is in that skills space. Companies doe not want to take their staff to courses (£2,000 a day), then learn all the horrible mistakes, one by one, as they do this one time activity often in the current decade. As you can see some will fall into two per decade, but most won't.

Then you come into company inertia. The larger the company the longer it takes to do anything. Especially with the current slew of regulations which cause "compliance" issues. So your "1 year job" may be in a company which finds it impossible to do an upgrade in less than 2 years.

So there you are. A contractor slave to the inertia of a company. You get no sick pay, no holidays (you can't bill you don't get paid), you have no security whatsoever, there is no HR process for a contractor only a termination clause in the contract which is often one week. There is no redundancy for a contractor and no employment tribunal for unfair dismissal. If you want to go after a client for unfairly dismissing you then you need to go to war in open court against solicitors who charge hundreds per hour.

Contractors, prior to IR35, paid about 25% tax and NI. A good deal you might think, but who wants to put themselves in a very high stress environment, with few holidays, working when sick, for the same as the person next to you who calls you a B@stard because your top line income is higher than theirs, regardless of the bottom line truth.

When IR35 hit contractors went from an aggregate 25% tax to an aggregate 52% tax. Contractors have to run a company, pay insurance for that company, pay personal tax, corporation tax, employees NI AND employers NI. Now a 1 man band, working for the public sector, also has to offer a workplace pension scheme, paid for by the company out of the single income of the director.

When IR35 was enacted 500,000 of the best IT professionals in the world, with the most flexible skills and working practises, left the UK. Most forever. This had the near overnight effect of making the only place the government could look for the skills they needed; the large consultancies. Because of the cost of the large consultancies staff, the Indian consultancies stepped in with cheap staff and cheap fixed price contracts.

Essentially what IR35 did was to take the UK from the prime exporter of high tech British staff to the net importer or cheap Indian staff and make India the back office solution for the world.

Way to go Gordon (bumbler) Brown.

This reliance on Indian staff comes with a cost. The RBS and Nationwide outage of transactions for 10 days was a direct result of the outsourced Indian support staff, in India, screwing up the roll back of a software update which failed.

Over the years IR35 has been watered down to try and lure back some of our best resources due to the increasing cost of the Indian resources and the tight labour market for these key skills.

Now we come to today. This latest grab has been estimated to net just under £500m in additional taxes. In fact it will cost the public way more than that.

I'm already in the situation where the stress of the environment is no longer easy to shrug off. In the last 20 years I've lived 100 years of most people's job stress levels in my industry. Which is why Mrs S and I have come to an agreement that I will step out and we'll move to a simpler life from 2019.

The Uni, on Friday evening, told my agency that it will be impossible to replace me and will certainly have an impact on the two projects I run. This is not posturing, they have nobody with my skills and knowledge to take over and it will be impossible to replace me with someone who can come up to speed by April when the migration goes ahead.

Whilst a lot of contractors will not be in such critical situations, many will. You don't pay for people like me and use them to do mundane daily work.

Anyway, sorry it was so long but I thought I'd just add to what Ossie said from the other side of the fence.