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It's not just the UK gov. Here in Holland, the tax authorities hold the client responsible if a freelancer doesn't pay his taxes; that forces clients to use agents to mitigate risks of freelancers to don't pay their taxes. At the other side of the equation you have these directives that turn freelancers into employees for tax purposes, thereby destroying their ability to compete by providing more flexible and cheaper service (deducting their business costs from tax) than the bloody great dinosaurs like Crap Gemini and so on who feel the need to finance huge flashy offices and top heavy management layers while failing to deliver on most of their big government projects.
There are 1,000,000 freelancers in Holland, spread across all sectors. Their average turnover is more than 100,000 euros. All these EU directives therefore threaten the competitiveness of people who account for about 100 billion euros of economic production; that's almost a quarter of the Dutch economy produced by one tenth of the workforce.
It's madness to think that any of this will benefit public finances; in the longer term it'll ruin public finances by strangling the economy and killing off the competitive ability of Europe.
Oh well, I feel like I´m preaching to the converted.
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