Mastodawn

2026-03-04 2090-2040

Bogus self-employment - who pays the price?

File on 4 Investigates

As the government’s flagship Employment Rights Act (2025) comes into force, File on 4 Investigates a loophole worrying experts: bogus self-employment. We discover hundreds of workers on government contracts are said to be wrongly classified as self-employed. This we are told is the tip of the iceberg as more employers increasingly choose to put workers on self-employed contracts rather than employing them as staff, without all the rights, bolstered under the new laws.

Some are suggesting that recent changes to National Insurance have meant more business owners are keeping workers off payroll to keep running costs down. We will look at small businesses where it’s become increasingly difficult to employ staff in the traditional way and find that some workers in hospitality for example like the flexibility that job apps can give them when picking up casual freelance work.

Presenter: Tom Wall
Producer: Rob Byrne
Technical producer: Cameron Ward
Production Co-ordinator: Tim Fernley
Editor: Tara McDermott

Show less
Download
Choose your file
Higher quality (128kbps)
Lower quality (64kbps)

Available now

37 minutes

On radio

Today
11:00
BBC Radio 4

#BBCRadio4 #BBCFileOn4 #BBCFileOn4Investigates

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002s4f0

BBC Radio 4 - File on 4 Investigates, Bogus self-employment - who pays the price?

Why is the rise in bogus self-employment a problem for all of us?

BBC

quangobaud Sep 24

FileOnFour #BBCRadio4 #BBCFileOn4

Inside the Migrant Hotel
File on 4 Investigates

It's a familiar story from the outside. Around 32,000 people are housed in migrant hotels around the UK and protests outside them have been violent and vocal.

Sue Mitchell has spent the summer getting to know a different side of the story - what life is like Inside the migrant hotels - and she's seen and heard some striking things:

Families who have been seeking asylum for nearly a decade;, a stream of prepaid taxis taking migrants to medical appointments and transporting them across the UK, families cooking meals in secret in hotel bathrooms and a system that appears to be broken, according to the people within it.

These are the first recordings that have been made of this kind. It's a story that has dominated the news, but hasn't been heard from the inside until now.

All names have been changed to protect the identities of hotel residents and staff

Reporter: Sue Mitchell
Producer: Joel Moors
Executive producer: Joe Kent

Inside the Migrant Hotel is a BBC Studios Production for BBC Radio 4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002k96k

BBC Radio 4 - File on 4 Investigates, Inside the Migrant Hotel

Sue Mitchell takes listeners into the closed world of the migrant hotels.

BBC