A new blog from New Policy Institute’s Hannah Aldridge on the London’s Poverty Profile website looks considers the growth of self-employment since the recession (one fifth of workers now self-employed) and the implications for poverty:
Data from the ONS shows that as self-employment was growing in London, the real incomes of the self-employed were falling considerably. Between 2007 and 2010, median self-employed incomes fell by a third (34%) in London, more than double the fall for the UK as a whole (at 16%). ONS hypothesise that this is due to underemployment among the self-employed, with growth in number of self-employed workers but not in the amount of work to go around.