I am writing in response to the government’s proposal to integrate income tax and National Insurance Contributions (NICs).

Integrating income tax and NICs will have a highly damaging effect on the 3m people who make up the flexible workforce in the UK. While potentially making tax issues simpler for business, it will put a large section of the British workforce at a disadvantage, which will ultimately damage the competitive advantage they bring to the UK economy.

The fundamental problem with the proposed integration is that it assumes the workforce is homogenous, rather than consisting of a variety of groups with different needs and responsibilities.

The government must recognise this and distinguish between the full-time employed and the self-employed or ’flexible workforce’ when formulating tax policy.

The government must also appreciate that the flexible workforce is made up of a range of people from self-employed highly skilled, specialist workers to low-paid, low-skilled, potentially vulnerable temporary workers.

Again, these different groups require different levels of support and have varying degrees of responsibility. A ’one size fits all’ taxation policy simply cannot be applied to all these different working groups.

In effect, the proposal will result in the self-employed and employed paying the same amount of tax, and yet the self-employed enjoy few of the benefits of a secure permanent work contract. Consequently, without the incentive and security of paying less tax to reflect the increased risk of being self-employed, the flexible workforce will diminish.

This means fewer self-starting, self-reliant and self-supporting individuals carving out work for themselves, resulting in a substantial loss to the UK economy - a blow the government certainly cannot afford at the moment.

Stuart Davis, chairman of the FCSA (Freelance & Contractor Services Association)

Best of luck for being brave and reckless

I refer to your Bloggers with Bite article in Recruiter 16 November, ’Brave or just reckless’. I have a great deal of admiration for anyone who is brave enough to leave behind the security of employed life in search of something better for their own and family’s future.

In the case of Mark Rainsbury your title is apt, in that it’s probably a little bit of both [brave and reckless], however with little guarantees of security either way in the current climate, whether you are employed or new business owner taking control of your own destiny in this manner puts you in control.

I wish you the very best of luck Mark and well done for being brave enough to take that first step to what will hopefully be a very rewarding future.

David Tait, divisional director - financial services division, Core Asset Consulting

Clarification: Hot 100

Here are two clarifications on companies appearing where they did in the Hot 100 (Recruiter 16 November).

• Morgan Law amended figures available: due to the transfer halfway through the year of their whole recruitment business to a new legal entity, not available via industry code searches by the compilers, the figures published in the 2011 Recruiter Hot 100 did not fully describe the full-year performance of the company. The effective results for the year were therefore considerably understated. Combining the two sets of filed accounts to cover both halves of the year, Morgan Law’s effective 12-month Gross Profit for the latest year was £7.8m, the number of employees was 48 with the Gross Profit per Employee at £161,920. This would have ranked Morgan Law 4th in the 2011 Hot 100 list and 1st among the Hot 10 public sector recruiters.
  
• Eden Brown figures included, unknowingly, some staff on contract to clients. Excluding these staff and only using in-house headcount the Gross Profit per Employee calculates at £113,533 ranking the company 29th in the Hot 100 2011 and 3rd in the Hot 10 public sector recruiters.