The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
You’d have to be a fool to hire anyone to work for you in Britain today
On her fourth day in the job, my new assistant baked me a cake. The Coronation of King Charles III was that weekend, and she made a beautiful Union Jack-themed lemon drizzle using blueberries and raspberries for the red and blue stripes. I was delighted and effusive, but the sweet treat proved the high point of our relationship. For my seemingly happy new hire lasted the grand total of 10 part-time days before resigning.
In an illustration of what a pain it has become to employ anybody these days, almost a year later, I am still trying to extricate myself from a morass of regulation and red tape. The saga has involved setting up and unravelling a payroll scheme; registering and deregistering for compulsory pension contributions; dealing with taxpayer funded “mediators” and countless calls to HMRC – not to mention shelling out a vast sum to the recruitment agency who found her in the first place. I am left wondering why anybody who can avoid doing so hires anyone these days.
The UK labour market more generally is in crisis. A grotesquely bloated benefits system has created an easy-come, easy-go attitude to work; “mental health” problems provide a catch-all excuse for unreliability and indolence; and employers face an heavy burden of rights and responsibilities, even for recruits who last just a few days. That all this has taken place under a Conservative Government, which purports to support business and enterprise, is all the more depressing. How much worse is the mushrooming of rights and red tape about to get?
I had turned to an expensive London-based recruitment agency to source a PA/housekeeper, after failing to find anyone interested in the job. In my part of the Cotswolds, there is such a mismatch of supply and demand for domestic work that the going rate for a cleaner is at least £20 an hour. Anyone who is cheerful, hard working, and routinely turns up when they say they will can charge pretty much what they like. These basic attributes are in bewilderingly short supply.
Eventually, I shelled out a cool £3,600 to a company with an excellent reputation for assisting would-be employers to find such help. Before long, they found me a great-sounding candidate. All seemed to be going quite swimmingly until out of the blue, after just a handful of hours spread over three weeks, the new hire emailed “with regret” to announce she didn’t fancy the job any more.
Cue a spirit-sapping tussle about whether her sudden departure did or didn’t represent a breach of her contract; exactly how much money she was owed; and just what to do about a multitude of compulsory tax, pension and payment schemes that had only just been set up and now had to be unravelled. In a particularly absurd example of the hoops involved, long after she quit, an official payroll scheme had to be set up and then immediately cancelled, to provide government agencies with the required records.
It led to a series of confused letters from HMRC featuring wildly inflated demands for unpaid PAYE, based on what was supposed to have been a long-term role but barely came into being. Several rounds of torture by call-centre musak later, His Majesty’s
Revenue and Customs finally determined that they were owed £45.59 – a sum that must have been vastly exceeded by the amount of taxpayer resources devoted to calculating, chasing, and collecting the cash. Imagine if all that time were spent doing something more productive! No wonder so many potential employers and small firms choose instead to keep muddling along by themselves. If they
their attitude towards foreign ownership of other great British assets.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak admits China poses what he has called “an epoch defining challenge to the international order” – yet successive Conservative governments have gone out of their way to court Chinese state investment in our utilities. The Tories even encouraged Beijing to design and develop new nuclear power stations. What could possibly go wrong?
Then there was the shambles over Huawei. Despite grave national security concerns, in 2020 Boris Johnson came perilously close to allowing the Chinese tech firm to develop our 5G mobile communications network. It took an intervention by Donald Trump to force him into an embarrassing U-turn.
Under pressure from spy chiefs, ministers are belatedly rowing back on our addiction to Chinese investment. But over the years, only a few brave MPs such as Iain Duncan Smith have shown any interest or concern.
Against this backdrop, the fuss about the Abu Dhabi-backed
Redbird IMI’s bid to buy the Telegraph
Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, needs to make things easier for employers in his Spring Budget
Media Group is bewildering.
Sadly no media outlet is as important to the population of this country as their drinking water, their central heating and their electricity supply
– yet ministers are being encouraged to treat the involvement of an Arab Sheikh in the potential acquisition of one newspaper as a national security threat.
Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has indicated that she is “minded” to open a second investigation into the Abu-Dhabi backed bid, fretting about “free expression of opinion and accurate presentation of news in the newspapers”. MPs are lining up to jump on the bandwagon.
Yet Redbird IMI has made it amply clear that the Sheikh will be an entirely passive investor. Multiple undertakings have been made about retaining the paper’s editorial independence. They are hardly going to turn it into
Where were all these people when Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev – a former KGB agent no less – bought the
And why aren’t they shouting from the rooftops don’t have huge accounts and HR departments it’s just not worth the risk.
What happened to me is dismally commonplace: employment statistics suggest almost a third of new hires quit within 90 days of starting a new job. Jeremy Hunt has done nothing to soften the blow. Quite the opposite! In one of his first acts as Chancellor, he reversed a valiant attempt by the Truss Kwarteng administration to reform much hated off-payroll working rules. The toughening of so-called IR35 regulations has spawned an entire industry dedicated to exhausting tick-box exercises to prove that freelancers and other contractors with multiple income streams are not “employees.” What a strange and disappointing move.
Critics will sneer that these are first-world problems, but the woes of busy company directors who cannot find administrative support; and well-off yummy mummies having to clean their own homes speak to a deeply dysfunctional labour market. While millions of able-bodied people are paid by the state to sit around at home, the Chancellor cannot hope to preside over strong growth.
As I finally disentangle myself from my former employee, I don’t expect anyone to cry me a river that, on the anniversary of the Coronation, I won’t have another pretty patriotic cake. However, unless Hunt uses his forthcoming Budget to make life easier for employers we will all be worse off.
about Chinese-owned TikTok?
The hysteria surrounding RedBird IMI’s bid is all the more curious given the benign role of the UAE in the Middle East. It poses no threat to the UK.
On the contrary, the Emiratis are our allies in a relationship that grows ever more important as the region becomes more dangerous and unstable.
Their leaders may not share all our democratic values, but when it comes to counterterrorism, they run a very tight ship, to the benefit of us all. Moreover, they were responsible for the historic Abraham Accords, without which the dreadful position Israel finds itself following last year’s Hamas attacks would be much worse.
has a hugely important influence on political debate, but it is not a train set. It cannot survive unless it makes money. If RedBird’s bid is successful, why would the investment fund destroy its new asset by crushing its reputation for impartial reporting?
If the Government blocks this bid, I look forward to Mr Li and others being given their marching orders.