Employment Freedom is the labour-market policy that builds on the Universal Services to connect the work people want to do and the work the country needs done. It restores the most essential choice in life: what to spend your time and effort doing.
Social benefit organisations and small businesses will be able to access low-cost labour through their Skills Centre, either hiring through the Centre, or by direct employment of Centre-registered workers. This creates a pathway to building community fabric and resilience while protecting and freeing workers to take the jobs they want without recourse to informal, unprotected jobs.
Initially set a maximum of 10 direct employees for small businesses and 20 for registered charities, Employment Freedom allows them to employ workers at 67% of the Apprentice National Minimum Wage. The relationship is entirely voluntary and covered by the full umbrella of Skill Centre protections.
The first-best option
It corrects an imbalance that has grown invisible because we have lived with it for so long: the cash-wage floor, raised steadily since 1999 to one of the highest levels in the OECD1, has come to do work that it was never meant to do.
When Beveridge wrote his report, he did not expect a wage floor to carry as much weight as it does today. He expected services to carry most of the burden (universal, well-funded, professionally delivered). But the UK, like most developed nations, never built the full set of services that would have created that settlement, and the wage floor became the second-best instrument of welfare because we failed to deliver the first-best solution.
Minimum wages have done that job in some ways, although they have failed to tackle poverty, but at a cost that does not appear in government statistics: the cost of work not done. Local councils that cannot maintain parks, paths, or seaside infrastructure to a decent standard, graffiti that is not removed, social care understaffed, the repair economy (shoes, clothes, bicycles, white goods, electronics, etc.) squeezed almost out of formal existence. Occasional and casual help that runs on cash, often invisibly, often by older or female workers. Community, civic, and cultural contributions that should be part of the formal economy but are not. Micro-enterprise margins eaten before the enterprise can take root, or never started because they cannot bear the costs of society that are unmet collectively. Whole layers of social fabric that the wage floor cannot support.
We have priced ourselves out of the quality of life that we want, locked ourselves into a wage economy that serves a different purpose, as a stand-in for social responsibility. The result is a decaying cultural, physical, and relational infrastructure.
P2030's Universal Services begin to put the first-best settlement in place. They are a down payment that reaches perhaps a quarter of what a complete Universal Services package would deliver, but they cover enough of the floor that we can open up the opportunities to contribute in equal measure.
Protected
Employment Freedom is what that change looks like in the labour market. Hours protections, overtime premia, safety law, anti-discrimination floors, and contractual rights all remain and even strengthened. The single instrument that changes is the cash-wage floor itself, reformed in step with Universal Services progression. Beginning with the smallest employers and the casual and occasional work where the floor's exclusion is most acute, it can be monitored through union and sectoral channels, with triggers if abuse patterns emerge.
The principle is straightforward: tie reductions in minimum wages to Universal Services progress. As coverage broadens, so does liberalisation. As coverage stalls, so does liberalisation. The two sides of the settlement move together.
In the first instance, Skills Centres take over the Jobcentre network, providing direct employment and replacing zero hours contracts and tenuous labour market attachment. They provide a regulated and protected channel for lower-cost labour in order to reanimate communities and foster the renovation of the public estate.
Employment Freedom is structural reform to strengthen community resilience.