Survey on self-employment for the Resolution Foundation
A quarter of those who started out as self-employed in the last five years would prefer to be employees, suggests new research from independent think tank the Resolution Foundation, conducted by Ipsos.
The number of self-employed people has risen steadily over the past five years but a significant minority of those who started out during this period would, given the choice, rather work for someone else. The new survey challenges common assumptions about Britain’s growing army of self-employed workers. On the one hand it shows that, contrary to suggestions that the new self-employed are in this position unwillingly, 72 per cent say they prefer their current situation to being an employee.
However, the Resolution Foundation research also shows that those who became self-employed in the past five years are much more likely to say they’d prefer to work for someone else (28 per cent compared to 11 per cent of those who have been self-employed for five years or more). It also shows that this new group is much more likely to cite a lack of work alternatives as the driving factor behind their decision to become self-employed compared to those who took this decision more than five years ago. Of those who became self-employed in the last five years, more than one in four (27 per cent) gave lack of work alternatives as the reason, compared to only one in 10 (10 per cent) of those who took the decision longer ago.
The survey is part of a major investigation into the changing face of self-employment in Britain being carried out by the Resolution Foundation which will be published next month.
Technical note
- Ipsos interviewed an online quota sample of 985 GB self-employed adults aged 16-65.
- Fieldwork took place between 28th March and 7th April 2014.
- Results are based on all respondents (985) unless otherwise stated. Where indicated, questions have been rebased to exclude ‘not relevant’ and ‘don’t know’ responses.
- Data are weighted by age and occupational group (source: Labour Force Survey).
- Where results do not sum to 100%, this may be due to multiple responses, computer rounding or the exclusion of don’t knows/not stated.
- An asterisk (*) represents a value of less than one half of one percent, but not zero.
