You are absolutely correct in laying the blame at successive governments that refuse to make the law clear. Companies such as Uber and Deliveroo do not help the case as they are seen as the examples of how the term freelancer can be abused. Unfortunately I doubt that those in government care to make the distinction between this abuse of the system and genuine IT contractors.
0. https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/work/rights-at-work/agency...
But it's a bit more subtle in that they're going after two different types of abuses:
1. Agencies that want to rent out contractors rather than contract out employees even when they treat these people as employees.
2. Relationships where one or both sides want an employee to be a contractor to benefit from tax savings.
Uber seems to fall largely in 1, while e.g. IT contractors sometimes fall in 2, or is at risk of falling in 2.
In our case the consideration tends to be that tightening the rules means there's a whole checklist of things that makes it more or less likely that HMRC will deem us to be de facto employed or subject to IR35 (making us pay taxes similar to if we are in employment).
For #2 and to avoid IR35 there are a whole lot of considerations such as what costs we incur, whether or not we use our own equipment, whether or not we have sales and marketing costs; whether we employ someone; how many clients we have; if we have our own office for the company etc. that centre around whether or not the company has an existence independent from any given client.
The reason this is important for us too, is that one avenue for a business like Uber to avoid problems with #1 is to try to restructure around not pretending that drivers clients are the people they drive, but that their client is Uber but that they're still independent. If they try stunts like that, it may result in rule changes detrimental to other, genuine contractors too.