I can hardly move for plumbers at the moment. Every time I turn on the radio, pick up a newspaper or look at a TV there is a plumber there with views about employment law and the so-called ‘gig’ economy. And if I decide to walk away, I am nearly knocked over by someone delivering food on a bicycle with a large cube on their back, dodging someone driving a taxi, flexibly and seemingly without obligation. Until he picks someone up.

Thankfully there are a host of experts and commentators on hand to explain this new phenomenon. A lot of it seems to be about technology or tax avoidance or flexibility. It all seems to be very new, although it is not at all. Without wishing to step on the toes of our Chair and start down the road of ‘I remember …’ or ‘In my day …’, none of this is new at all. Taxi drivers have always been treated as self-employed. In the days before one used an app to summon a lift, one called the local minicab firm who sent a minicab driver who was self-employed. If he was ill and didn’t work, he didn’t get paid.

Plumbers – and for that matter, electricians, plasterers, decorators and so on – have, generally, always been self-employed and didn’t have paid annual leave, unless they were paying for it.

I worked as a motorcycle courier for a number of years and was paid by the job, had no holiday or sick pay and no rights if work was not given to me and I ended up without a job. That was 30 years ago.

None of this is to suggest that there are not serious issues to address with these working arrangements. They are open to abuse and can be insecure. They do provide flexibility and paid work and many of those working in this way like the ‘gig’. What intrigues me is how wide the coverage of this employment law issue is in the mainstream media, particularly given that it is not a new issue. It may be because of the scale of it: there are around 4.7m self-employed people in the UK, around 15% of the workforce. That in turn may mean that those previously untouched by these issues are now.

For those fearing I might have managed to get to the end without mentioning tribunal fees or the Government’s review of them, fear not. I am not going to add my voice to the many who have commented on the quality and conclusions of the review itself (almost as crowded an area as worker status), but I do observe that tribunal fees affect a far, far wider group than the gig economy. Workers, employees and in some cases the genuinely self-employed are all affected by the introduction and level of tribunal fees as any one of them may have rights they wish to enforce in an employment tribunal. Many will regard this as being an issue about access to justice and the ability to use existing rights rather than seek further ones. The same can be said for the proposals for reform of the tribunal system, so well set out by Richard Fox and Joanne Owers in this issue.

Yet despite these being issues of near-universal application there has been very little coverage of either, certainly in the mainstream media. Perhaps if they had an app it would be different.

Alex Lock, DAC Beachcroft LLP