One of the subtlest and most insidious changes in the last few decades has been the steady transference of costs onto the employed and self-employed, and not just in ever-rising tax levels. Even just existing means increasingly paying for the infrastructure and hardware out of one’s pocket to access services, or even actually doing the work of those services ourselves.

The most recent and most basic has been the ‘doctor in your pocket’ scheme of the Government’s that essentially means that if you want to access the NHS then you must supply a smartphone, which as we all know involves a piece of kit that is all too easily lost (or stolen) and needs replacing every three years or so, and paying for a phone service. To say nothing of handily serving as a device that can track your every movement, though that can be useful when it gets stolen and you can haplessly follow its journey to China.

How many people are aware of the imminence of making tax digital? It applies to self-employed sole traders or those receiving income from property.

Here’s what the Government’s own page says:

When you need to start using Making Tax Digital for Income Tax depends on your qualifying income within a tax year. If your qualifying income is over:

£50,000 for the 2024 to 2025 tax year, you will need to use it from April 6th 2026

£30,000 for the 2025 to 2026 tax year, you will need to use it from April 6th 2027

£20,000 for the 2026 to 2027 tax year, the Government has set out plans to introduce legislation to lower the qualifying income threshold (so this tier isn’t yet in law but should be before too long)

Note the key term qualifying income. You might think that means the actual income received after the deduction of expenses. Not so. The term is a euphemism for gross turnover.

Here’s what the Government’s qualifying income page says:

HMRC will assess your gross income (also called your turnover) before you deduct expenses.

For example, your gross income (income before you deduct expenses) could be:

• £25,000 from rental income
• £27,000 from self-employment income

In this example, your total qualifying income would be £52,000.

It’s self-evident that a sole trader running a business with a high turnover, but a small income thanks to high expenses such as cost of materials and staff, will thus be drawn into the net. Bear in mind that this figure is merely one to be used by HMRC to oblige you to join Making Tax Digital. It isn’t what you’ll be personally taxed on; that’s your net income after allowable expenses.

And what is Making Tax Digital anyway? Here’s what it entails:

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is a new way for sole traders and landlords to report their income and expenses to HMRC. 

From April 6th 2026, some sole traders and landlords must use it, based on their total annual income from self-employment and property. 

You, or your agent if you have one, will need to use software that works with Making Tax Digital for Income Tax to: 

• create, store and correct digital records of your self-employment and property income and expenses  
• send your quarterly updates to HMRC  
• submit your tax return by January 31st the following year

Note the key phrase need to use software. Yes, that’s software you will have to spend time researching, choosing, installing and of course paying for (unless you are lucky enough to have such a simple business that you can land on a free tier service though whether those will last is anyone’s guess). If you use an agent, of course, the agent will have to tool up with all this and charge you accordingly.

This is unlike the existing tax return system, which allows the taxpayer to complete the return online through the HMRC website without having to install special software.

In practice it will mean reporting and paying tax four times a year, with four opportunities for HMRC to charge automatic penalties, especially as there will be four opportunities to make mistakes. Why does one get the funny feeling that if the software goes wrong or is corrupted and someone’s reporting or payments get messed up, it’ll be all the taxpayer’s responsibility?

This whole principle is now so insidious that it has pervaded every aspect of our lives. Appliances come with QR codes to download the PDF manuals that are no longer supplied in paper form. Almost any service you care to try and access now involves going online, from checking in for a flight to communicating with a school office.

Banks close branches and then pretend they’re still there for their customers. Account holders have to provide a laptop and a mobile phone to access their money. One friend of mine was told she could not move an ISA by branch staff, even though she had personally gone to the branch (a rare find in itself). The staff (what a miracle there were any there at all) ended up having to walk her through doing it on her phone in the branch.

Even the dentist operates like this. Before my twice-annual check-up I get sent an email and a request that I fill out all their forms at home in advance. And you need a mobile phone for the login OTP. My time, my phone, my computer. What turned up last week? Yet another letter notifying me of the monthly direct debit being increased.

Whatever you think about Working From Home (WFH), it’s essentially turned even more private houses into 24-hour office premises equipped with high-speed internet, laptops, printers and whole rooms or even garden buildings converted into extensions of the office but mostly and sometimes all at the employee’s expense.

Even though some employers are turning away from WFH, it still suits them that their staff are now all tooled up to work at weekends and other times. And, perish the thought, the next time a ‘pandemic’ erupts and the government decides how brilliant it would be to lock us all up at home again.   

I’m a freelance author, though now I’m also a state pensioner. I have been freelance for over 35 years, though during that time I’ve also spent extended periods as an employee, so I’ve seen it from both sides. As a freelance writer I’ve seen the relative value of receipts from books generally decline, but the load and the costs transferred to me from publishers have steadily increased over the years.

It’s impossible to live off erratic and variable book earnings unless one is very lucky, so in practice it means I subsidise the publisher. It doesn’t work the other way round. Publishers and printers depend for their incomes and existences on the products created by authors, even if they add value by turning them into finished and saleable items. Unlike them, I have never ‘lived off’ books because I couldn’t afford to. They’re a useful extra, but that’s all. Therefore, they need people like me more than I need people like them. If I stopped writing it wouldn’t make much difference to me, but a lot more to them.

And don’t get me started on agents. Of all the world’s non-jobs they take the biscuit at 15-20% plus VAT. I’ve tried a couple. One rejected the title of a book I was planning. I sent him alternative after alternative. He dismissed them all until one day he announced he had the solution and proudly sent it to me. It was the title I’d suggested in the first place. I sent him packing.

Along the way, for nine years I was a fulltime schoolteacher (2007-16). It was, believe it or not, a very rewarding experience. But I spent a small fortune not only on everyday resources, but also on supplying a computer that worked properly (unlike school ones), my own internet connection (the school one was always going down), hard drives, printers, paper, cameras, you name it. The increasingly wretched financial state of schools meant the inhouse provision was useless. Stumping up myself saved me from going mad.

None of that was tax deductible, yet the school and parents expected a 24/7 response to emails and a 24/7 educational service. I spent countless school holidays scanning in material and creating resources – all at my own expense as is commonplace for teachers. Some, in the more deprived areas, end up personally subsidising the children’s food and other resources.

Perhaps one of the most insidious developments has been the campaign to shove ever more young people into universities and colleges from where all too many of them emerge into the working world. There they discover there are simply not enough jobs to fulfil the expectations that they’ve been fed. For this privilege they are led into tens of thousands of pounds in debt, which many will never pay off, a millstone that will haunt them indefinitely. Indeed, an increasing number discover that despite the repayments, after a few years they owe more than they started with. And most have absolutely no idea of the true implications of what they are letting themselves in for.

This has normalised the crippling effects of debt – debt created simply to keep large numbers of university staff in jobs. Yet even when I went to university more than 45 years ago it was already apparent that plenty of the lecturers and professors did very little in the way of teaching. During Covid they did next to nothing at all, and having discovered what they could get away with it hasn’t improved much since. It’s an extraordinary system that exists only because of debt.

As it happens, in the early 1980s I discovered just how useless university academics can sometimes be. I already had a degree from the 1970s, but while working fulltime I signed up to take a BA in History at the University of London as an external student. The tuition was my responsibility. All I had to do was pay a registration fee to sit the exams. I duly rolled up in the summers of 1984 and 1985 to sit the papers, having taught myself. I got a 2.1 Honours, better than 95% of the other students, internal or external. And that was back in the days when almost nobody got a first and a 2.1 was a ticket to ride. I hadn’t attended a single lecture or tutorial. I set myself the essays and wrote them one by one.

Yes, I had to do it all myself but at least I hadn’t paid anyone.

There is, it seems, no limit to the extent that costs can be transferred to the individual in almost every context, while simultaneously jacking up prices and taxes. It’s become the new state and business growth model. You increase ‘productivity’ and profitability by moving steadily towards a vision where the organisation does nothing at all except charge for the services which are often performed by the customer. This is far easier than attempting to improve the business. A friend just told me about the house purchase experience, where she had to fill out all the forms for the lawyers she was paying through the nose for.

What about insurance? I pay it, whether for the house, the car, or travelling. Do I have any confidence at all that any of it would ever pay out? No, of course not. I was stuck in Rome during the ash cloud crisis in 2011. Did the travel insurance pay out? Obviously not. Why would it? I just bore the cost of an overnight train to Paris from Rome and then the Eurostar into London. In 2020 I was in Australia when the lockdowns were impending. We had about four days to play with. Singapore Airlines had disappeared like a rat up a drainpipe. Thai Airways saved us (for £900). Would the travel insurance pay out? You guess.

To this we can add another phenomenon: shrinkflation. Do you remember how big a Mars bar used to be? Obviously, some here-today gone-tomorrow boardroom reptile came up with the idea of reducing the size but not the price. Now they’re not worth buying. The same has happened to baked beans. It’s the most absurd policy imaginable for increasing profits since the only outcome eventually could be selling empty packaging.

I’ve drifted a bit from where I started. But the whole thing reminds me of Chico Marx ripping off Groucho in A Day At The Races. He sells Groucho a whole series of useless handbooks, though at least Groucho got the books rather than a fistful of QR codes to download them in PDF form. You can watch it here.

Life has always been a bit of a swiz but these days doing people up like kippers seems to be one of the few growth industries left.  

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His latest book, The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus) is published August 7th 2025.