Supreme Court referee ruling redraws the mutuality and control tests behind IR35
The unanimous PGMOL judgment confirmed that the two tests contractors most often rely on to prove self-employment can be cleared far more easily than the sector assumed.
On 16 September 2024 the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in Commissioners for His Majesty's Revenue and Customs v Professional Game Match Officials Ltd, dismissing the referees' body's appeal and finding that two threshold tests for employment, mutuality of obligation and control, were both capable of being met in each individual match engagement. The dispute concerned a tax bill of about £584,000, but its reasoning governs the same tests HMRC applies to every contractor's off-payroll status determination.
A decade of litigation, decided unanimously
The case reached back to the 2014-15 and 2015-16 tax years and turned on whether match fees paid to National Group Level 1 referees, engaged as sole traders and officiating in their spare time alongside other jobs, should have carried PAYE and National Insurance. PGMOL argued that its part-time officials fell short of the irreducible minimum of employment because either party could pull out of an appointment before kick-off, and because the organisation could not intervene once a match was under way.
Five Justices rejected both arguments. Giving the lead judgment, with which Lord Hodge, Lord Leggatt, Lord Stephens and Lady Rose agreed, Lord Richards held that "sufficient mutuality of obligations may exist even if the parties' obligations are only in existence during the period when the employee is working for the employer." On control, he found that the obligations imposed on referees during an engagement "was capable of giving PGMOL a sufficient framework of control to meet the control test for employment purposes." The court did not declare the referees employees; it sent the case back to the First-tier Tribunal to weigh all the circumstances in the round.
Why the two tests matter for IR35
Mutuality of obligation and control are the load-bearing tests in any employment-status or IR35 assessment, and contractors have long treated a shortfall in either as proof of genuine self-employment. The judgment closes that escape route. It confirms that mutuality can arise within a single short assignment, and that control need not mean day-to-day supervision.
Dave Chaplin, founder and chief executive of IR35 Shield, said the ruling brought welcome certainty. "Our status determinations have never made mutuality or control determinative, and the determinations have always been multi-factorial, considering everything in the round," he said, adding: "The law is now certain, and firms can rely on it."
What it meant for contractors
For IT contractors working through personal service companies, and for the end clients and agencies obliged since April 2021 to decide their status under the off-payroll rules, the practical message was that no single factor settles the question. A contract engineered to strip out mutuality or control will not, on its own, put an engagement outside IR35 if the overall picture points to employment.
Seb Maley, chief executive of the status specialist Qdos, called it "a landmark case that puts the issue of employment status firmly on the radar of all businesses." He warned that "employment status is complex, nuanced, easily misunderstood and misapplied," but that "the sheer cost of getting things wrong means it must be prioritised."
More than ten years after HMRC first raised its determinations, the referees' own status remained undecided, awaiting a fresh First-tier Tribunal hearing. The tests contractors must satisfy, however, are now settled, and lower than many had assumed.