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Should contracted tradespeople provide their own tools and materials for HMRC to consider them sub-contractors? It’s a very interesting question and it probably falls into the category of another one of the urban myths that surrounds Employment Status. Now, for someone to be genuinely self-employed, they have to be in business of their own account. I’ve said it many times that the cornerstone of the working relationship is the contract between the worker and the client. If there is no contract in place, the Revenue will look at the details of the working arrangements and one of the things they’ll look at is ‘does the contractor provide all the equipment for the job or does the subcontractor provide some of the plant and equipment?’ Now there’s historical case law where the Revenue won the argument that even if a tradesman provides the majority of his hand tools and equipment, he can still be classed as an employee because they are the tools of the trade and he would be expected as a skilled individual to provide those tools, even if he’s engaged under employment contract, rather than on a self-employed contract. So I guess it’s a bit like the argument around time. People have fixed ideas about how long someone can be engaged for before they become an employee. That’s completely the wrong way of looking at it; the terms of an engagement are established at the outset of the engagement and time is irrelevant to those arrangements.