Scribe:
Boom! Nice post albion.I fell foul of the old self employed truck driver thing. I had my head turned with a minimum hourly rate of £15, thought I was on a good thing (60 hours x £15 - you do the sums) and jumped in without carrying out due diligence.
Upshot of that is, I’ve spent the last 12 months with an attachment of earnings on my wages from HMRC, which equates to £45 a week ON TOP of my regular contributions. Its a killer and I only have myself to blame.
In albion’s post in the quote above there are some published articles, the one I’ve read is from Truck & Driver magazine and that spells things out clearly. truckanddriver.co.uk/big-lorry- … ink-again/
Operators will tell you all sorts of things why what they’re offering is different. Why what they’re offering is perfectly legal.
Its all a load of tosh designed to save them money and responsibility to you, the employee. The fact is you can’t be a self employed truck driver unless you have an operators licence and your own truck(s). Period.
Its what the Road Haulage Association says. Its what HMRC says. And I believe them over some shyster truck operator trying to pinch pennies.
Chances are you might get away with it for a period of time. Chances are however like me, you get caught and end up with a backtax bill there’s no way of avoiding.
The discussion everyone should really be having IMHO is how are companies/agencies still allowed to advertise a scheme which is clearly unlawful? Fire up indeed.com and its full of this self employed manure.
Me? I had pound signs before my eyes and got burnt as a result. But there will be young drivers who know no better, getting caught up in this and left paying backtax years after the lucrative job they accepted has gone by the by. That doesn’t seem right to me in the cold light of day.
If you insist on disregarding some very sound advice in this thread, and jumping into one of these self employed jobs, caveat emptor.
To be fair though, what many (most?) agencies offer is not “Self Employment” but “Limited Company” status (typically through some sort of umbrella scheme) where the idea is to channel the money through the “Company”, thus avoiding NI and regular Income Tax on (most of) the cash. As far as I am aware, none of the tests mentioned earlier apply to these arrangements.