The end of One man band Contractors?

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Sounds like you're either:
Taking the mick with expenses
Or have miscalculated your tax liability. It is a single digit percentage. And stop confusing the issue where a contractor gets paid more. That's because they are flexible, cheap to get rid of, cost nothing in pension, sick pay, holiday pay or bonuses. That's worth a premium. They are taking more of a risk.

Either way, you're being incredibly overzealous about this.

yea wtf contractors are taking risks.

Doesnt that blooming count?

And contractors are specialised skilled people in general. The market i am at, you simply cannot get a perm contractor with same skill as i have that can do the job.

And those who may be nearly as good as me, get persuaded by the likes of me to go contracting

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Can confirm the tax difference between perm and contract is not big. If contractors weren't paid more per day than perm, then nobody would do it.

And then employees would be screwed as they cant hire temp staff and get rid of them on a whim. or reduce/dont increase headcount.

Dont underrestimate the importance of head counts on a company

[scaryjim]

... they cant hire temp staff and get rid of them on a whim. ...

Employment law doesn't actually grant "permanent" employees as much protection as most people seem to think: I believe the current situation (unless it's been changed again since I last checked) is that you can give an employee notice without reason (or at least for any non-discriminatory reason) anything up to 2 years after they started working for you. And of course there are plenty of other options, like zero-hour contracts and short fixed-term contracts. OTOH, having those people on your books means you need to do all the HR administration for them. The real benefit of contractors is that there's a lot less administration required (and, as Peterb's pointed out, you also don't have to pay employers NI for them etc.).