Mind the gap: How to protect the self-employed

Many readers of this column will class themselves as one of the UK's 4.4 million self-employed workforce. And if we add in the 1 million people in the UK who are on a zero-hours contract, the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures suggest that around 5.4 million people in the UK are not in a salaried role. For a lot of people, working for yourself makes good sense – it can be flexible, can fit around the family, you can charge what you like (within reason) and who wouldn't want to oversee their own destiny?  Over the last decade and certainly since the pandemic, we ha...