I want to make some more progress.
Secondly, we want to push the Government to take action on disguised employment in the construction industry. Employers falsely declaring their workers to be self-employed is a long-standing and well-documented issue in the sector. Although there is of course some necessary and genuine self-employment in the sector, employers are currently able to declare someone to be self-employed when they exhibit all of the characteristics of an employee.
That results in three problems. The first is a cost to the Exchequer. The Treasury has estimated that that entailed a static cost of £350 million in 2009 and the House of Commons Library recently produced an estimate of about £500 million. The second problem is that those falsely classified as self-employed are denied their employment rights. That means that workers might work for the same company for several years, effectively as an employee, while not receiving any of the resulting employment rights, such as sick pay, holiday pay and maternity and paternity leave.
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