Responding to the news that the Chancellor has dropped the National Insurance tax hike for the self-employed, John O'Connell, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said:
"It is heartening that the Government has decided to abandon the much-criticised rise in national insurance contributions for the self-employed but this whole episode has drawn attention to the fact that our outdated tax code needs drastic reform. The Government is clearly petrified that the changing nature of work will erode its tax base, but the only way to deal with that is to make our overly complex tax code fit for the world we live in, instead of the fiddling around the edges that leads to embarrassing policy u-turns. The TaxPayers' Alliance has long campaigned for the merging of income tax and national insurance which would deliver the necessary reforms by introducing the transparency and simplicity our tax code so desperately needs."