New data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) covering the period January 2019 to March 2022 has revealed the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the UK’s self-employed workforce. This time period also saw self-employed workers hit by the introduction of IR35 reforms in the private sector.
In late 2019, there was a peak of 5 million self-employed workers in the UK (approximately 13 per cent of the total workforce), however, this had fallen to 4.2 million by March 2022, as hundreds of thousands of workers moved from self-employment to employee roles.
ONS data revealed that self-employment fell across all industries, with a particular decline in the construction sector. While still remaining the UK’s largest self-employed industry, the number of freelancers working in construction fell from 914,000 at the start of 2020 to 765,500 a year later (although this had rebounded in 799,000 by early 2022).
The data also showed significant increases in self-employed workers remaining in the same job, but reclassifying their status to “employee” from April to September 2020. This trend, which the ONS notes coincided with the furlough scheme, was most pronounced among business directors, partners and people working in high-skilled roles.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, figures show that the sharpest fall in self-employment was among men. In January – March 2020 there were 3.3 million self-employed men, but this had fallen to 2.7 million people during the first quarter of 2022, the lowest level among men for more than a decade.
The decline in self-employed women was less sharp, but still showed a drop from 1.7 million in the first quarter of 2020 to 1.5 million two years later, the lowest figure since 2016.
One factor that did remain consistent was the average (mean) age of self-employed workers, which stood at 47.5 years during Q1 2020 and increased marginally to 47.6 years in Q1 2022. However, the ONS also noted that the number of self-employed workers within the 45-54 age bracket fell by close to a quarter of a million during this time.
