IR35 legal challengers reveal new details

Judicial Reviews to challenge IR35 reform’s implementation by the NHS will go ahead, regardless of whether a funding campaign to help launch them hits its target.

Issuing this clarification, the Independent Health Professionals Association said a central JR and a more minor one would not be derailed if the campaign failed to raise its goal of £45,000.

“Judicial reviews will take place irrespective of whether the [funding] targets are reached,” the IHPA’s secretary-general Dr Iain Campbell told ContractorUK yesterday.

“Crowdfunding will help us to fund this and broaden our scope targeting ultra vires acts by public bodies. We will also be putting IHPA funds into the JR process”. 

A separate bid to challenge IR35 reform in the public sector (not its specific implementation by the NHS regulator) was launched in June by Mike Gibson, an IT contractor.

But in a statement to ContractorUK, Gibson has confirmed the campaign to be “taking a breath,” despite his attempt to raise funds succeeding by exceeding its target of £10,500.

He is asking PSCs who are against the off-payroll rules to write to their local MP to object. And a roundtable event with critics of the public sector-wide framework is on his agenda.

But the NHS challenges, if successful, might have sector-wide implications too. “There is much to be gained here for public sector workers both within and outwith the health [arena],” says Campbell.

“[Our] attempt [is] to end unlawful blanketing under IR35, [and] end sole reliance on the legally inaccurate and nigh-on rigged HMRC CEST…tool, in favour of the use of the case law.”