Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

IMHO, the following situation surely cannot be defined by HMRC or allowed by the government to qualify as 'self employment':

City Link’s army of self-employed workers count cost of business failure

From: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/01/city-link-army-self-employed-count-cost-failure

More than 1,000 drivers and agency personnel were classed as ‘service delivery partners’ - no guaranteed hours, no sick pay, no holiday pay and no redundancy payment

Jennifer Rankin and Sarah Butler
The Guardian, Thursday 1 January 2015 18.14 GMT

On New Year’s Eve, more than 2,300 workers at City Link found out their jobs had been axed. But more than 1,000 self-employed van drivers and agency workers who earned a living from the failed parcel delivery firm will not receive a redundancy letter.

John Baginton, a 54-year-old van driver, has had no communication from the company since he found out from a news website on Christmas Day that his job was gone. “It has left a bitter taste in my mouth. I still haven’t had a letter or an email to say my job’s finished. Nothing from head office to say ‘thanks for your loyalty’. They didn’t even send a text message.”

Baginton, not his real name, was never counted as an employee by City Link. Although he worked for City Link, and its predecessor Direct Express, for nine years, he has never been on the payroll. In City Link parlance, he is a “service delivery partner”. In other words, a contract worker with no guaranteed hours, sick pay, holiday pay or entitlement to redundancy. City Link owe him £2,400 for three weeks’ work. But he doesn’t expect to see any of this money: “I very much doubt it, as we will be the last of the last [on the creditors’ list].”

Even after last-minute talks to save the firm failed, City Link was still advertising on its website for “passionate” people who wanted to be their own boss. The firm, owned by multimillionaire Jon Moulton, claimed that drivers could earn £43,000 a year.

Phil Valentine, a contractor who has worked for City Link “on and off” for six years and runs six vans, dismissed the £43,000 figure. Once a driver paid for fuel, insurance and a weekly charge for a van, earnings would be more like £28,000 a year.

Baginton said: “Gross-wise it looks good, but net-wise you are probably looking at around half of that [£43,000].” Officially self-employed, he paid his own taxes and national insurance. Work started at 4.30 in the morning and sometimes didn’t finish until 7.30 at night.

Holidays were rare, because it was hard to find a replacement driver. “If we have two weeks’ holiday, it will take us two months to recover. It is a double whammy. First because you lose your wages and second because you have to pay someone else to do your job.”

Illness was an even bigger problem. Last year, City Link docked him £75 for missing a morning’s work after he came down with food poisoning. “I rang in sick the night before and I said I didn’t feel well. They rang throughout the morning and asked ‘where are you?’” He went in at lunchtime, still feeling unwell, but found out a week later he had been fined. “I asked my boss: ‘What’s this charge for?’ And he said it would have been £150 if I had missed the whole day. So I had gone in sick and I had basically worked for free.

“Before Christmas I had a chest infection for two weeks and my wife was saying I should stay at home. But you can’t. You have it at the back of your mind: ‘I am going to get charged.’”

City Link contract drivers are part of an army of self-employed labour that has boomed during the recession. Around 4.6 million people are self-employed in the UK, 15% of the working population, the highest proportion for 40 years, according to the Office for National Statistics. The biggest growth category for self employment is not consultants tapping away on laptops in cafes, but taxi drivers, carpenters and bricklayers. Delivery workers are not counted separately in the statistics, but there is little doubt their numbers have grown as Britons have embraced online shopping. Around 1.7bn parcels were delivered in the UK in 2012, up from 1.3bn in 2005, according to PWC.

Amid fierce competition for a slice of the £7bn parcel market, costs are being squeezed, especially as big customers, such as Amazon, develop their own delivery networks. “There is constant downward pressure on parcel carriers which they can only deal with by economies of scale,” said one distribution industry source.

Mike Parkinson, a City Link contractor who is owed £7,500 for unpaid work, saw higher payments for early-morning deliveries dropped after Better Capital took control of the firm in 2013. He could be fined if he missed a delivery slot.

Baginton was paid £2.15 per delivery, no matter how many items were going to one house. “I could have 20 parcels and that is classed as one stop and I get paid the same.” Sometimes he delivered flat-pack furniture stamped with “2-man lift” for the same £2.15 rate he would be paid for delivering a T-shirt.

Mike Cain, an employment lawyer at Slater & Gordon, who successfully fought for compensation for warehouse workers and delivery drivers working for the collapsed Comet retail business, said:

“Self-employed contracts are playing a major part in the so-called economic revival. Under such contracts, worker rights and access to legal protection are minimised if not removed altogether and the risk and the costs if a business fails are being shifted downwards.”

Trade unions are worried this model will spread to the whole industry, including the Royal Mail, now in private hands.

“While the parcel market has grown quickly, so too has the number of operators at an even faster rate. The same principle applies to post and the UK’s 650-year-old post operator, Royal Mail, faces intense pressure of its own,” said Billy Hayes, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union. He accuses the regulator, Ofcom, of shirking its responsibilities by failing to apply standards to fledgling companies that will do anything to undercut the Royal Mail. “One of the worst impacts of Ofcom’s current approach to let the free market have its head is the downward pressure they support, to reduce pay and terms and conditions, and encourage a race to the bottom for workers.”

Ofcom said parliament was ultimately responsible for regulating workers’ rights. “Ofcom has a duty to secure the universal service for postal users. We do not regulate terms of employment, which are for individual companies to determine.”

The department of business, innovation and skills said the government was conducting a review into “how to make a person’s employment status clearer and how this affects their employment rights”.

“Workers and businesses should be free to agree the terms of an employment relationship and the government does not want to restrict people’s ability to choose how they work. This ensures a flexible and vibrant labour market, supporting growth and delivering jobs.”

Meanwhile, Baginton is consulting a solicitor friend for advice about his rights. “I don’t think the government realise what this job entails,” he says.

Here's the link to the articles 'Comments':

Start of comments

Some explanation about how City Link's financiers were mislead:

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/city-links-private-equity-owner-accused-of-breaking-funding-offer-9951106.html

City Link's private equity owner accused of breaking funding offer
Exclusive: Jon Moulton's Better Capital fund wrote to the courier in September promising to provide finances to keep it going for another year

The Independent
JIM ARMITAGE (DEPUTY BUSINESS EDITOR)
Wednesday 31 December 2014

The private-equity fund that owned the City Link parcels business wrote to the company as recently as late September pledging to provide finances to keep it going for another year.

City Link’s accounts show that it received a letter from Jon Moulton’s Better Capital fund on 30 September, stating the latter’s “current firm intention to provide finance sufficient to enable the business to continue as a going concern for the next 12 months from the date of approval of the financial statements”.

Those financial statements were lodged in accounts filed at Companies House on 9 October, with City Link’s management saying: “No matters have been drawn to the attention of the directors to suggest that further funding will not be forthcoming as required.”

Just 11 weeks later, on Christmas Eve, the firm collapsed – threatening the jobs of nearly 3,000 staff – after Better Capital’s fund stopped financing its losses.

The letter will raise further concerns among creditors of City Link, who claim they were misled about the financial state of the business, particularly the 1,000 subcontractors working as drivers who are likely to be left owed thousands of pounds after the administration process.

A spokesman for the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) said: “This is just another broken promise from a company that was encouraging subcontractors to invest in new City Link kit and van leases just two weeks ago, even though it must have known it was in trouble.”

Mr Moulton insisted that the letter was not a pledge, and said it was made clear that the 12-month financing plan was only “current” at the time it was written. He said the accounts made it clear that the business was struggling.

The accounts also reveal that Better Capital received management and administration fees, totalling £337,000 last year, in return for its fund’s £40m investment in City Link. Had the company survived until Better Capital’s loan was due to be repaid in 2018, it would have received interest charges of £3.3m. In the event, no interest was paid to Mr Moulton’s company.

The accounts show that Spicers, an office equipment supplier also owned by Better Capital, was paid £190,000 by City Link during the year, while the double-glazing company Everest – another Better Capital firm – spent £8,797 as a loyal City Link customer.

The accounts reveal that City Link’s chief executive, Dave Smith, received £646,000 in pay and pension contributions last year, up from the £368,000 that the former Post Office managing director earned the year before, when CityLink was owned by Rentokil.

Filings at Companies House show that Mr Smith and other directors set up a business called City Link B2B Limited, with the Better Capital fund as its shareholder, on 8 December. This was established with the idea that the company could rescue part of the business with a so-called company voluntary arrangement – a scheme that freezes a struggling business’s debts to give it breathing space to restructure. While this did not happen, the existence of the plan will also cause concern for those, such as its contractors, who extended credit to City Link in the weeks before its collapse.

Most of City Link’s nearly 3,000-strong workforce will be formally made redundant today, The RMT is planning a demonstration at the firm’s main hub in Coventry.

If you read the comments below the article. As pointed out by one reader, this chap has been with City Link on the same contract for nine years (Labour in power). His career choice then?

The two articles above provide a great lesson on how to make a ton of money stitching people up.

EL - the contracts will have been well researched and cleverly drawn, probably along the lines that the deliveries are made to individual clients and thus the driver is deemed to be working for those clients rather than directly for city link as agent for same - and the same will apply to all other courier companies


almost inevitably, this driver blames "the government", but of course this is totally incorrect and misdirected

Hardly surprising CityLink went bust if they were paying their van driver £41K+ a year!

Baginton, not his real name, was never counted as an employee by City Link. Although he worked for City Link, and its predecessor Direct Express, for nine years, he has never been on the payroll. In City Link parlance, he is a “service delivery partner”. In other words, a contract worker with no guaranteed hours, sick pay, holiday pay or entitlement to redundancy. City Link owe him £2,400 for three weeks’ work. But he doesn’t expect to see any of this money: “I very much doubt it, as we will be the last of the last [on the creditors’ list].”

no they weren't!
read the article properly

RF ,

I was using an analogy.

If you don't treat the tramp and the causes of his disease, he dies, but not before spluttering his death over some others in society.

Treat, the disease and causations and then both society and the tramp may survive more comfortably.

The majority of "emigrants" are fleeing their expectancies in their own countries in the hope of better life elsewhere.

The majority of them eventually contribute to the wealth of the country they settle in.

-------

My father-in-law was defined as State Less and may have been rejected now, if he applied to immigrate to the UK now, but because of his multiple qualifications contributed to the wealth and well-being of the UK.

The majority of his compatriots who entered this country at the same time did likewise.


He was a polylingual civil engineer and employed as such, but contributed to society in other areas.

His wife and family, arrived later in this country after being "released" by their country of origin. They again contributed to the society which they lived in.

There is a huge difference between person or persons that came to Europe decades ago or the honest people that apply for a visa to come to Europe to work and these rejects/criminals that are arriving in the southern med on dodgy ships and such....I could go on all day about this....they know that by smuggling themselves in that what they are doing is wrongful so it is the duty of the coastguards to deal with these people like you deal with criminals...this is where a European law should be passed so that customs and such can take far more dramatic like actions in dealing with a catastrophic immigration disaster in the making. !....

I did, if these guys were self employed then fuel, van hire and costs are all tax deductible... And I said if "CityLink were paying there van drivers", not, what van drivers where taking home..

If you read between the lines "The firm, owned by multimillionaire Jon Moulton, claimed that drivers could earn £43,000 a year. Phil Valentine, a contractor who has worked for City Link “on and off” for six years and runs six vans, dismissed the £43,000 figure. Once a driver paid for fuel, insurance and a weekly charge for a van, earnings would be more like £28,000 a year."

City Link van driver cost £43,000 each, the van drivers don't dismiss the figure but talk about take home seeing them lose £15K of this. All the same City Link was still seeing £40K+ on its books as van driver expenses.

Double posted

No doubt subject to a nice commission:


A spokesman for the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) said: “This is just another broken promise from a company that was encouraging subcontractors to invest in new City Link kit and van leases just two weeks ago, even though it must have known it was in trouble.”

ah but shortie ..... city link will be taking a commission on renting the vans, providing the insurance and even on the parcel scanner ...... and of course they take a pretty good mark-up on the jobs themselves

in addition, city link have no liability for NIC liability, holiday or sick pay

the most likely cause of their problems will be the interest payments and other lumps they will have been forced to make to Better Capital and it's also a racing certainty that the top management will not have stinted on their own rewards either

finally, it would have been worth questioning - no chance now - how INefficiently the depots themselves were run .... pretty hopeless is my guess

I bet none of the costs stated take into account depreciation of the vans themselves.

3 years old, half price.


http://www.vcars.co.uk/used-cars/used-mercedes-sprinter.php

RF,

You are missing the point!

I personally don't wish for an insular, isolated UK, which may develop from the populist views being propagated by Ukip and the tory party's neo-fascist wing.

-------

Just started reading Andrew Marr's book "History of the World".

Interesting commentary on the development off societies and "possible" reasons for the paths chosen.

If you have time have a look. Might interest you.

Max - it is very unlikely that CL actually owned the vans

No, I didn't think they did.

The vans come on a handy lease arrangement via citylink, so the drivers are on the hook for any payments.

My point was the capital reduction from the vans losing value.

Phil Valentine, a freelance who runs five vehicles for City Link in the Lake District, said he was owed about £21,000 for two and a half weeks’ work. During that time, he had incurred expenses including drivers’ wages and insurance for the vans plus a £3,000 fuel bill. He has been told he is unlikely to receive any of the money he is owed and will now have to seek new work and pay out as much as £1,200 per van to have them resprayed in the livery of any new employer.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/31/city-link-administrators-redundancy-notices

This is the risk of being self employed and working for just one person....

perhaps the Cl drivers can get a payday loan, now the gov has made them "fair"



Payday loan caps come into force


New regulations introduced by the FCA mean loans will now be capped at 0.8% a day, as over 1 million borrowers benefit





Well over a million people will see the cost of their borrowing fall now that new price caps on payday loans have taken effect.

However, early indications are that many of the sector’s bigger players will be charging the maximum amount allowed to under the new regime, rather taking the opportunity to set their fees below the cap.

Interest and fees on all high-cost short-term credit loans are now capped at 0.8% per day of the amount borrowed. If borrowers do not repay their loans on time, default charges must not exceed £15.

In addition, the total cost (fees, interest etc) is capped at 100% of the original sum, which means no borrower will ever pay back more than twice what they borrowed, said the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which has introduced the new rules.

Someone taking out a £100 loan for 30 days and paying it back on time will not pay more than £24 in fees and charges.



More good news here:http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jan/02/payday-loans-caps-fca

It took far too long for the FCA to act on pay day lenders, this should have been done years ago.