Companies in Britain's growing gig economy are forcing workers into bogus self-employment and free-riding on the welfare state, an influential committee of MPs has said. In a damning assessment of modern employment practices, the parliamentary work and pensions committee calls on the next government to bring laws up to date so that workers are better protected from exploitation. Given concerns about the rising number of workers classed as self-employed contractors with no access to sick benefit or holiday pay, it wants the default status for people in the gig economy to be "worker" rather than "self-employed"....The committee...highlighted that forcing people into self-employment as couriers, taxi drivers and other roles, rather than taking them on as employees, was depriving the state of badly needed tax revenues and creating an extra burden on the welfare system...The report comes ahead of the government's Taylor review of modern working practices, which is likely to recommend that self-employed gig economy workers should be granted greater protections and benefits....Monday's report also notes that self-employed people and employees receive almost equal access to the services funded by national insurance contributions "yet the self-employed contribute far less"...

[refers to Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon & Hermes]