There’s much speculation about ‘how we’re going to pay for all this’. You can bet HMRC are going to be called on to rake in as much as they can in the next few years, and IR35 is back on their list of priorities. Its principle is that anyone supposedly self-employed and working for one person is actually an employee. It’s been around for ages but has been really difficult to enforce; in fact, HMRC lost a court challenge on it just last week. And its strict enforcement will impact what some call the ‘gig economy’, others (IDS again) the ‘flexible working practices which make us the envy of the rest of Europe’. So we’ll see.
“HMRC scraps plans to tax pensions after death”
A couple of other Statement Highlights (in my world, anyway). A welcome ‘nothing happened’ on the treatment of pensions on death. They were never going to be liable to IHT (too complicated with trusts and trust law) but there was talk of making them income-taxable on the recipients at whatever age you die.
