It's obviously a minefield, especially substitution. If you're being hired for specific niche in-demand skills, why should you be expected to provide someone else?
What seems to happen in practice is the Revenue occasionally has a spasm and decided to investigate a selection of freelancers. This ends with a lot of confusion, plus various tribunals and court cases, because the reality is not clear and many freelance situations can be argued either way.
The simplest option - not infallible, but very helpful - is to have multiple clients and work mostly from home on fairly short projects. That makes it very hard to argue that you're an employee.
If you're on-prem and exclusive for an extended period for a set number of hours, supervised by management and using equipment supplied by the employer, it gets much harder to convince a court that you're genuinely freelancing.
https://www.brooksonfaq.co.uk/knowledge-base/what-are-the-ir...
It's obviously a minefield, especially substitution. If you're being hired for specific niche in-demand skills, why should you be expected to provide someone else?
What seems to happen in practice is the Revenue occasionally has a spasm and decided to investigate a selection of freelancers. This ends with a lot of confusion, plus various tribunals and court cases, because the reality is not clear and many freelance situations can be argued either way.
The simplest option - not infallible, but very helpful - is to have multiple clients and work mostly from home on fairly short projects. That makes it very hard to argue that you're an employee.
If you're on-prem and exclusive for an extended period for a set number of hours, supervised by management and using equipment supplied by the employer, it gets much harder to convince a court that you're genuinely freelancing.