Flexibility at work

Record-breaking figures for employment in the UK economy have become almost mundane. Yet the latest data from the Office for National Statistics deserve attention, not least in the light of current political debate about the labour market. Some 74.6 per cent of working-age people were employed in the last quarter of 2016, the highest proportion since records began.

That is a vivid reminder that Britain’s flexible labour market has weathered all the recent storms of the global economy and powered ahead. A generation ago, politicians and voters alike often talked about unemployment: the fear of joblessness was significant, at both a personal and national level. Today, the conversation is less about who has jobs than about the nature of those jobs.

Here, some politicians are in danger of losing sight of what matters about the labour market. They fret about the “gig economy” and selfemployment, the people who work on a freelance basis providing everything from plumbing to pizzas. Such workers, it is argued, need more rights and protection, rules to ensure they are treated like full-time employees. A Government review is under way, with talk of new rules and regulations that could only make it more expensive for companies to employ such people.

This overlooks the fact that, as Dominic Raab observes on the page opposite, many such workers relish flexibility in their work: that is why they chose such employment. And instead of looking at ways to make it more costly to hire freelancers, ministers should narrow the gap by making it cheaper to employ staff on regular contracts. In the labour market, flexibility works, to the benefit of workers and employers alike.