I’m starting to lose count of the rulings that various authorities have now laid down with regard to ‘gig economy’ workers being deemed employees to some extent despite their official self-employed status.

Deliveroo, Uber, Hermes, Addison Lee and now Pimlico Plumbers have all lost (so far) in their respective battles to defend their position whereby they hire self-employed individuals in order to avoid having to pay sickness and holiday pay together with further benefits that include getting around employer PAYE and National Insurance contributions too.

These are not the only ‘swerves’, though, as ‘non-employees’ will also not have the same protection where employment tribunal matters would otherwise be concerned such as unfair dismissal. Clearly this is deemed as an upside to some employers that may feel they would rather avoid such responsibility, regardless of the ethics involved.

Therefore it’s easy to see why, selfishly at least, these firms choose to set out their recruitment policies like this (albeit one can only imagine the effect on tax revenues if all companies took the same stance).

But moped riding pizza-deliverers and cab drivers are not the only professions to be caught by what is sure to become a growing scandal. Some estate agents are also now part of the problem and, in my view, will also be subject to the same judgements that we are now regularly seeing at employment tribunals and the Supreme Court.

In particular Purplebricks and Yopa, the online listing agents, utilise ‘non-employed’ workers to undertake home visits for them. In most cases these are individuals who are self-employed but are required to set up separate limited companies from which they trade.

This separation means that these hard-working property valuers have no employment protection, are not able to be guaranteed the statutory minimum wage where applicable, and are not able to claim sickness pay or holiday pay.

And, of course, the companies that they are contracted to represent, save hundreds of thousands of pounds over long periods by avoiding these obligations, as well as avoiding NI and PAYE levies.

HMRC states that encouraging those that would otherwise be employees to set up a limited company is not a cast-iron way for employers to get around what an employee ‘looks like’ in rule terms.

In fact they have recently published an online tool that defines via a number of criteria (sources of income, control over various aspects of your work regime etc) whether a worker is really employed, self-employed or a bona-fide limited company for the purposes of tax. This, one imagines, has parallel implications similarly on what constitutes employment relating to sickness and holiday pay and rights. (The BBC have also been thwarted using Personal Service Companies to avoid tax and have been told by HMRC that it is not legitimate to do so.)

I’ve tested the tool by inputting as if I were an online agent’s self-employed LPE and the answer it threw back was: ‘You are employed’. See https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/check-employment-status-for-tax/setup

So what if Purplebricks or Yopa LPEs were to take issue with their status and take legal action as the Uber drivers, Deliveroo riders and Gary Smith the plumber did? It seems that it is now increasingly likely that they would succeed.

Compellingly, this perhaps means that a carve-out might have to be made in the accounts of such businesses to meet the potential for the retrospective claims of past and current LPEs at many hundreds and thousands of pounds each.

I’m no accountancy expert but most would agree that in this age of financial scrutiny, especially where public businesses are concerned, a provision is easily arguable.

But my main concern is this:

In the event that estate agents turn out not to be caught by the latest Pimlico and Uber precedents, surely the companies involved should then be required to point out clearly and properly to potential customers that these field agents are not their local experts at all, but actually separate, legally distant limited companies working on their behalf and that they have little control over?

And with the likelihood that they are doing additional, alternative jobs at other times too, and are not full-time employees with all of the comfort that the consumer might derive from such a belief.

They surely can’t have it both ways.

* Russell Quirk is CEO and founder of Emoov, which is now merged with Tepilo and Urban. He tells us that all of the business’s local valuers are fully employed.

Purplebricks is adamant that its LPEs do not work in the gig economy and, as limited companies, recent court rulings on employees’ rights do not apply.