I, too, congratulate the Government on bringing forward this important Bill. It was a pleasure to serve on the Bill Committee. I believe that the measures it contains will make a vital contribution to helping a cause that I believe in passionately: helping more people take on employees for the first time.
We have to get more of the growing band of self-employed people in this country to want to take on an extra employee and we have to overcome the barriers to that. Some 4.2 million people in this country are self-employed, which is 14% of the population, up from 12% at the turn of the century. The good news is that part-time self-employment is down and full-time self-employment is up, which is a good thing, because people are finding that it is a worthwhile form of employment and are making a contribution to the economy. The push factors in driving people to that form of employment are on the way down and the pull factors are clearly on the way up, and more young people want to get involved in self-employment.
However, the real challenge and opportunity that the Bill addresses is that of encouraging more of the self-employed to want to take on their first employee and helping people to see the benefits of working in that environment. Sadly, the pace of improvement in that area is not keeping up with the increase in self-employment. We need to help the self-employed to nudge open the barriers to becoming first-time employers and feeling confident to take on employees, whether they are tangible barriers in IT, legal matters or human resources, or perceived, more psychological barriers such as their concerns about dealing with HMRC or about getting rules wrong in employing somebody.
In the Adjournment debate I held on this subject at the beginning of November, I talked through a whole series of options that we could consider to help address this challenge, but the most important thing to do today is to acknowledge that this Bill takes some vitally important steps in doing so. It will be a boost to first-time employees, whether they are apprentices, long-term unemployed, those who are economically inactive, or those who are looking for their second, third, fourth or even fifth careers.