£1,000 bounty on head of contractors
The Professional Contractors Group accused the Government of helping large companies introduce a 'corporate blood money scheme' which aims at replacing UK highly qualified contractors with cheaper imported labour.
The accusation follows an investigation by the Mail on Sunday (December 24) which revealed that computer-services company, FI Group, is offering its employees a £1,000 bounty to nominate UK contractors with the company who could be replaced by cheaper workers from the Indian sub-continent.
The PCG represents the interests of more than 11,000 contractors and has been warning that the Government's controversial IR35 proposal is a charter to destroy the small entrepreneurial business.
PCG's Chairman, Gareth Williams, said: "This shameful move by FI shows that the Government's 'fast track' visa scheme contains a massive loophole. While it would be illegal to replace employees with workers from overseas, there is nothing to prevent independent contractors being treated in this way. These are the same independent contractors the Government wants to treat as 'employees' when it comes to tax purposes, rather than let them operate legitimate businesses they want to be.
"Far from halting the skills shortage, this scheme is now being used for short-term cost saving by short-sighted companies, to the detriment of the UK's small businesses and the country's long term economic prospects. And it is the Government's legislation which has enabled them to do this.
"Companies like FI will discover to their cost that it is not so easy to force out highly skilled contractors and try to replace their years of experience with cheaper imported labour. They will pay for their greed with slipped deadlines and spiraling costs, and they will find the homegrown engineers with the knowledge and experience to fix the problems have moved abroad and are helping the development of projects in the US, Germany and Holland.
"In the long term this will run down the UK's skills base and train up our competitors, who will return home taking the experience they have gained here with them.
"This comes in the wake of the IR35 legislation which treats independent contractors as 'disguised employees', preventing them acting as businesses and disallowing their legitimate business expenses. Yet this demonstrates once again that contractors are not employees and have none of the rights of benefits of employees.
"The Government is complicit in this scheme by choosing FI Group to act as a pilot in self-regulating its own visa applications. By supporting this measure, the Government has shown the foolishness and nonsense of its own legislation.
"Every member of this Government who is associated with this should hang his or her head in shame that they have created a scheme which puts a bounty of £1,000 on the head of a small business in the UK and, at the same time, encourages a form of high-tech slave labour."
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Susie Hughes