I shall be brief, as I know nobody wants a lengthy debate tonight. I have a couple of specific points to make about reviewing the income tax treatment of workers who provide services through intermediaries. We are asking for a review. I understand the Government’s point that they feel that their approach is sensible for the majority of workers and that it is levelling the playing field for the majority of people, but there will be unintended consequences on specific issues and in specific areas, and they are going to be a major problem.
We have mentioned that this will have a disproportionate impact on rural communities. That is partly because of geography, as those communities are further away and it is more difficult for people to make cheap travel arrangements to go there and for people to find reasonably priced overnight accommodation. That will have a disproportionate financial impact. We do not want specialist contractors to choose not to go to a rural community on the basis that it will disproportionately cost them money, as that will mean our rural communities will lose out; they will not have the ability to get whatever it is that needs to be done in that community because the contractor will choose to go somewhere cheaper. That is a major issue, particularly in the oil industry, as has been said, and in the whisky industry. The whisky industry may have specialist contractors that need to go to rural locations in order to do things, and we do not want those areas to be disproportionately affected.
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One big issue for rural communities is that the Brexit scenario means that they will lose out on huge amounts of European funding, and we do not want them to be further negatively impacted by this regime, so we are asking for a review. I understand that studies have been done and predictions have been made, but we all know from last week that predictions can go horribly wrong. We do not know how this will work in practice. The Government know how much it currently costs, but they do not know what impact there will be on workers’ behaviour when this is introduced. We therefore want the Government to look at this in a few months’ time to see whether it has had that negative effect, particularly on rural communities.
The last thing I want to say is that the reduction in net income has a disproportionate effect on those on lower incomes, so this is a regressive measure. I wonder whether that could be looked at in any review to see whether contractors doing lower-paid jobs are less likely to choose to go to rural communities on that basis.