IR35 risks in the services procurement tailspend

Obvious vs hidden IR35. The grey areas between buying a service and hiring labour.

With Matt Fryer, Head of Legal Services, Brookson

00:00:00 - Coaching, consultancy and a focus on IR35
00:06:00 - Complexities of IR35 and the hidden risks in the supply chain
00:16:30 - The divide between buying a service or hiring labour
00:25:00 - Making strategic resourcing decisions
00:34:00 - Workforce solution providers and outcome-based work
00:40:00 - The opportunity for small businesses and consultancies
00:46:00 - Status determinations on outsourced services and SoW
00:52:00 - Education on using SoW effectively
00:57:30 - Predictions on IR35's on the future of work

Transcript

Jonny Dunning:   0:01       Excellent, and we’re off. So I’d like to give a very warm welcome to Matt Fryer who is the head of legal services at Brookson Legal. Thanks very much for joining me, Matt. How you doing? 

Matt Fryer:          0:11       I’m good, Jonny.  Thanks for having me. How are you? 

Jonny Dunning:   0:15       I’m very good. Thank you. And we’re going to be discussing some interesting and potentially quite technical topics, which is I’m glad we’ve got your expertise in the conversation around IR35 risks in the services procurement tailspend. And so lots of interesting points to come on to around that. I think we’re both basking in the English sunshine in slightly sweltering rooms our houses today. So, for anyone watching this please forgive us, if we get a little bit kind of glowing along the way. It’s pretty hot where you are as well, Matt.

Matt Fryer:          0:43       It is warm. Yeah, it’s nice to have the change from all the rain we’ve had recently. But I guess, classic Brits, it’s getting a bit too warm now. Let’s see how we go. 

Jonny Dunning:   0:54       Basically, we complain about the bit in the middle, but that’s the only bit we can actually handle. 

Matt Fryer:          0:59       That’s it. 

Jonny Dunning:   1:00       So, I want to come on to your professional background before we get into the conversation, but before we get into that as much as his professional background as well, but I know you have a bit of a passion for football and I believe, you do some coaching. Is that right?

Matt Fryer:          1:13       I do. Yes. Originally, I’m from Blackburn, which was a football hotspot in the mid-90s. As some of you might recall, we Blackburn Rovers winning the Premier League. So yeah, I’m keen follower of football, still a Blackburn Rovers fan even though not been doing so well recently. But I’ve got two boys, both of them into football. So I started coaching one of the teams seven years ago now. So it’s been quite enjoyable. I can no longer play. Well I could never play really. Now I sort of play through the team.

Jonny Dunning:   1:48       I’m assuming you and probably your lads as well very much enjoyed the euros, if you’ve got over that now?

Matt Fryer:          1:55       To be honest with you, didn’t like the expectations leveled rise too much in our house. So been there before. But I think, we did well, once you reflect on it to get to the semi-final is no mean feat.

Jonny Dunning:   2:09       I think it’s brilliant, great effort. I really enjoyed it and I love what Gareth Southgate is brought to the team and to the way that the team interact with the public and what as a fan, how it feels, the players’ feel about playing for England. I just feel like they really appreciate it and they love it and it’s special. Any particular things as a coach you kind of taken away from Gareth Southgate experience?

Matt Fryer:          2:35       I think he’s keeping calm under pressure here. You’ll be amazed even though it’s an underrated football game and you’re stood on the sidelines and things don’t quite go so well. The temptation to shout and scream and run up and down the touchline is there at that level. So, I think he’s done really well to stay calm and composed in those critical moments. I think that’s a learn for me.

Jonny Dunning:   2:58       When that first goal went in, in the final after like two minutes or whatever it was, it was unbelievable. He literally didn’t react. I think he looked up at the clock or something like that. And then but there’s no reaction over his face. I was like, “Wow, that is pretty ice cool.”

Matt Fryer:          3:13       Yeah, cool, calm and collected unlike me on a Saturday morning in the rain. 

Jonny Dunning:   3:17       It’s all about the passion. So, in terms of your career, you actually started on the consulting side. Is that right?

Matt Fryer:          3:23       I did. Yeah. So all my career I’ve worked in the tax arena, trained with [unclear 03:30], straight out of university was there for three or four years. And then that was down in Redding. And I moved back to the northwest back to Manchester, and spent best past seven years at KPMG. So in that consulting world, advising predominately individuals, smaller businesses on tax issues. And so that’s sort of my background. My background very much is in that consulting world. And it’s an interesting area to learn the ropes, I guess, in some of those big consulting businesses, obviously, these are large global corporates, the ability to spread your wings relatively early in your career, what wasn’t there? So I took the decision probably 12 years ago to stay within in tax, but move into to Brookson, essentially, we are still a consulting firm, but very niche now.

Jonny Dunning:   3:27       In terms of what you’re focused on now at Brookson, obviously head of the legal services side of things, what are your kind of primary points of focus?

Matt Fryer:          4:40       Yeah, so I’m very much IR35. But also any tax or legal issue that impacts that supply chain for contingent labor is really our sweet spot though. So, we are very niche in what we do. And we have two divisions within the group. One helps the contractor with their accounts or whether that be with IR35 obligations when it was the contractor pre-April 21. But Brookson Legal with that knowledge, obviously, we’ve refocused into the public sector four years ago, out quite a large number of public sector organizations comply with the new rules. And as you can imagine, we’ve being very busy for the last 18 months in the run up to April 21 with private sector clients prepare. So it very much has been pretty much 100% IR35. But it’s interesting now we’re starting to receive more queries around AWR obligations, how to correctly pay a contractor who’s inside IR35. But some more of those broader tax issues that sort of come next in that thought process once you’ve got through your IR35 review.

Jonny Dunning:   5:56       And what would you say, your current key observations are from the last couple of years, basically leading into IR35 finally going live in the private sector?

Matt Fryer:          6:08       I think the main observation is, it’s been continues to be very difficult for businesses to get their head around it. And we’re yet to see what best practice is going to look like. And lots of people trying lots of different things to comply, but it is. And it’s probably understandable, it’s not been an issue that businesses have had to consider before. It is quite a complex issue. And it involves almost a business wide change program to get all the relevant stakeholders to understand what needs to be done, and why. So I think we’re fortunate really, that HMRC did go live in April 21, with the change, but they have talked about South London businesses a bit more time to get the head round, they educated themselves and put processes in place. So yeah, I think there’s still quite a lot of work to do, particularly in some sectors who may be a bit more risk averse. On the flip side, those people that do understand it, we’re starting to see some interesting and creative and possibly pushing the brown boundaries a little bit. So it’ll be interesting to see what solutions for want of a better expression are floating around the market. So certainly interesting times in that contingent labor space in London.

Jonny Dunning:   7:24       Do you think the fact that HMRC have kind of taken a soft initial approach or put that across? Do you think that that’s been helpful or unhelpful in the main because obviously, with regards to that soft approach, it’s not soft, in terms of the tax liability is soft in terms of the potential fines as I understand it?

Matt Fryer:          7:43       Yeah, you’re exactly right, Jonny, I think he’s been on helpful really, and essentially, it probably resulted in some businesses thinking I will wait till April 22, without them fully understanding the implications of that. So you’re exactly right in what you say if HMRC find error, they’ll still want to collect the taxes and the National Insurance, they will just forego any penalties as long as it’s been fraudulent or negligence got on that. Yeah, I don’t think it’s been particularly helpful. It was probably driven more at a policy level to help try and drive this through with the April 21 kickoff. You can imagine HMRC saying to policymakers in government, “We’ll give everyone a free ride for the first 12 months.” And it hasn’t quite transpired to be a free ride. So, I think they could have done that better.

Jonny Dunning:   8:34       Yeah. And so when you talk about the kind of broader services that people are getting involved in, bringing you guys into and asking about, you mentioned AWR and things like that. Obviously, we’re here to talk about how this is the potential impact and the risks within the services procurement tailspend. Have you seen that come up in conversations? How’s that started? Because I know there’s obviously this is clearly an obvious risk within the contractor population. But then there are what I’ve heard you described before, is kind of like hidden IR35 risks.

Matt Fryer:          9:09       Yeah. So, it probably first came up back in the public sector changes back in April 2017, where we started to see and there was media coverage around them government departments now, not necessarily engaging contractors directly for the individual, personal service and talent. Not necessarily engaging with agencies as much for that contract to tell them but go into large consultancy firms. So essentially, no doubt we’ll get into the technicalities as we go through but R35 is about is only really considered where someone has to provide personal services, it is not personal service, it’s outsourced service and the rules don’t apply. Now that in itself, we could probably talk for an hour what that means but there is the hard issue. So, if you buying labor from an agency, IR35 is in play, if you’re buying services from a service provider is not in play for you as the client. Now the service provider might need to consider IR35, if they’re using contractors. So, we have seen some businesses circumvent the IR35 rules by saying, “We’re not going to use contracts anymore, we’re going to package work up and buying contracted services.’ It moves the problem away from them, and it moves it to somebody else. What we saw as a result of that was some businesses tried to reinvent themselves. So some agencies or lots of agencies, now we’ve got project arms or solvency arms, and they’re trying to move into that outsource service space, because they know that there’s a benefit to their claim in that if they can take away the IR35 obligation from them. We also see, and we have some large consultancy businesses as our clients, they are now seeing a real commercial benefit. And they’re winning business off the fact that they can take IR35 risk away from a large business once projects delivered via electrical project pool, essentially, but really is becoming a hot topic. And it still remains quite a large area of confusion as well.

Jonny Dunning:   11:24     And what about when you look at organizations, genuine kind of services procurement spend, because I appreciate that since the IR35 reforms, there has been a shift in people saying, “Well, okay, we need to get these parcels of work done differently, we need to outsource them, because the current way of doing it, it just doesn’t compliant. And we’re not gonna be able to do it in that way.” And but surely, there’s a massive existing problem. And it’s something certainly with as a tech provider in this space, we’re looking at services procurement, looking at Statement of Work, we certainly see it when people actually audit their services procurement spend, not all of it is necessarily genuine Statement of Work or generally services that are procured. Is that something you guys are seeing at all, or companies starting to address it?

Matt Fryer:          12:08     Yeah, we’re seeing a hell of a lot of that. And the more businesses I speak to the more it’s becoming a common problem. I think the response from most businesses to IR35 change has been by HR or internal recruitment to lead the project. Obviously, with interest from finance, from legal, little interest from procurement, to be fair, so it’s very much slack in the staffing area of the business. Which is right, because that’s where most of the IR35 reset, because that’s where you directly engage your contractors or your love agencies supply chains. But once businesses have sorted that out, they’ve quickly realized that they’re paying or using contractors who haven’t been supplied through that HR or internal recruitment side of the business but have come through procurement, for example. And when you start looking at that exactly to your point, Johnny, they suddenly realize that actually, what this business that is purported to be a service provider is acting very similar to the agencies over this side of the fence. But in reality, we’re just buying labor from them. It’s not package service of work. So then procurement start to get interesting because this is where the hidden risk in the supply chains comes. So we are starting to see particularly in bigger businesses procurement, starting to show an interest in this, starting to try and understand the different types of service providers they’ve got their business and starting to pocket into, is that actually labor or is that properly outsourced services? And it can be quite hard to do that. And it’s quite confusing for business. There’s not a lot of guidance from HMRC out there. The legislation isn’t very descriptive. And I know from CBI meetings that I’ve been on recently, some of the biggest businesses in the UK are citing this as the biggest issue remaining with their IR35 risk response program almost to the extent of asking for HMRC for further guidance, further clarity, relaxations in around this area until people can get their head around it. So it very much is a real hot topic boiling under the surface, I think.

Jonny Dunning:   14:26     Yeah, so you’ve got that initial problem to be solved around what risk are we currently carrying that we’re not aware of. So there’s hidden risk, which if you look at it from procurements point of view, or financial legal within a large organization, if they’re not capturing that data, if they’re not capturing that services spend effectively that’s going to be pretty difficult to track down. It’s going to be basically purchase orders, invoices into the finance department, small suppliers in that big long tailspend. The business stakeholders are buying in directly. It’s obviously a way that people sometimes get around headcount freezes and things like that. So this so called kind of that we want to call it rogue spend, but there’s potential misclassification, that is a risk that already exists, potentially is quite a large risk in some organizations, in some sectors. But then also you’ve got this situation where organizations are saying, “Well, okay, if it’s not feasible to get this chunk of work done using contractors, how are we going to do it? We’ve, maybe, asked everybody to go PAYE and we’ve lost some people, some people don’t want to do it, or it’s not gonna be feasible.” So there’s that additional risk, which comes off the back of that, which is potentially some work shifting to a different engagement model, a different delivery model. So, I think it’s absolutely crucial that organizations understand this not just for the present risks that they’ve got for the potential additional risks that will be created, if they decide to resource things in a slightly different way. But you’re right, it is quite difficult and it’s quite technical when it comes down to the nitty gritty of it. I think visibility is probably the most important thing in the first case, because even if somebody brings in a consultancy like yourselves to look at this and address it, you’ve got to see the information. So it’s probably going to be fairly tedious process in lots of cases. And certainly what we see when people are trying to organize information more efficiently through using our technology, for example, it’s about lining stuff up. So you’ve got visibility, and you can put the governance on it and have an audit trail. Whereas at the moment, when you’re going into organizations, I imagine you’re probably having to look through spreadsheets compare people who’ve got system access versus who’s a contractor supplier, and who’s invoicing versus all these different things.

Matt Fryer:          16:37     Yeah, in some instances, you back to the purchase ledger. Let’s go through the purchase ledger, look at spend, who’s this? What’s the name of the company you’ve made? Look on companies’ house, is a big company, small company, let’s see the contract quite often, no one quite knows whether there is a contract. So the hardest part in all of this is the identification. And I often talk about sort of corralling different contract types into different pots. As soon as you’ve done that, then you can bring in a specialist that can help give you some advice, you can take so much. But while it’s a bit of a wild west, and you don’t know what you buying very hard to progress from that point. 

Jonny Dunning:   17:21     Yeah, absolutely. So, we’ve talked about the kind of difficulty in identifying this spend and getting the visibility on it, if people aren’t effectively doing that at the moment, which in my experience, vast, vast majority people aren’t anywhere near it. And there’s also this kind of gray area between buying an outsourced service versus hiring labor. I always say very simplistically, as either your time materials as you’re buying a person’s time, versus a statement of work engagement or an outsource service is where you’re effectively paying a company to deliver an outcome and as a fairly simplistic way to describe it, I appreciate. How do you kind of, appreciate it’s not an easy thing to do. But how do you tend to break down this divide?

Matt Fryer:          18:10     I guess the reason it’s important is when you look at the IR35 rules, obviously, the main change here is it’s no longer the contractor that has to make the employment status assessment, it’s the client. So the question is, who is a client and in a lengthy supply chain sign with a contractor working up to the final sort of company in that chain who along the ways the client. And this is very much about trying to identify who the individual contractor is providing their services. So in a very simplistic way, if I’m a contractor engaged through recruitment business, providing my services into a client of the recruitment business, is very clear that the client is a recruitment business is the client for IR35 purposes, because they are buying my personal service through the agency. The agency is a conduit through which my pay goes, they take a margin than I had in anything else really, obviously, they finding me and doing some checks on me, I’m just being provided and paid through the agency. So, very nice, very clear there. On the other side of the spectrum, KPMG for an example, if I was still at KPMG, advising a business and I was a contractor, not an employee of KPMG, then ordinarily KPMG would have a project in place with a client to deliver some tax advice, or just be the individual that they’re using to do that. And I might be being paid 300 pounds an hour for instance. KPMG will probably be charging me out 1500 pounds an hour because the whole brand around that there’s a whole, there’s insurances in place as a whole team I could call upon. So in that instance, obviously you buy in tax advisory services from KPMG and the contractor providing my service to KPMG to provide to their client. So in that example KPMG would need to do the IR35 assessment on me. Now, quite often, you find instances where someone sits in the middle. And it’s not very clear whether it is just labor that’s being provided or more than just labor in the services in that, say, HMRC have provided some guidance. It’s only one page of guidance, you can find it on HMRC’s website. And it talks about first principle here is the contract and the working practices are equal. So what you’re trying to identify is, is this a contract for the provision of labor? Or is it a contract for the provision of outsourced services? And then when you test the relevant clauses in that contract, they actually happening in the ground on practice? So if the contract is reflective of reality, then obviously we can start to review the contract to look for some key identifiers. And without going into too much detail on this, obviously, if the services start naming individuals in the contract, if the recipient of the services, so the client wants to select the individuals wants to interview the individuals, again, it’s pointing towards them buying that individual services. If, however, the contract is that for the provision of a project, and it doesn’t stipulate how many people are needed, let alone who they are, and what qualifications they might have, then you moving more towards that looking like an outsourced service contract. Obviously, the way that payment is made, if it’s paid on number of hours’ work, times a rate, and there’s different rates for different people. And the service provider is just taking a small margin and then effectively, the rest of the funds are flowing through to the individual, again, it looks like an agency supply of labor. If it’s priced on deliverables, if it’s a project with milestones and there’s an ability for the service provider to profit, or actually make a loss if they get this staffing levels wrong. And that’s looking like outsourced service. So, about back into your statement of work is termed as bandied about statement of work is the contract, isn’t it? So, there’s becoming tried and tested contracts out there that demonstrate that it’s provision of service, not labor. I think the challenge is making sure that the working practices under client fully understands that they’re not buying my [unclear 22:28] services, and they can’t direct me in terms of what I need to do. They can’t be interviewing or selecting me. They’re interviewing and selecting the service provider. So that’s some of the general principles. It might sound quite black and white, given some of those examples I’ve given but quite often, you land in a gray area. And then that’s the challenge at the moment.

Jonny Dunning:   22:50     Yeah, great. I think, from my point of view, I mean, we’re obviously not IR35 technical expert, but from a statement of work point of view, or service acumen point of view. The way that, for example, our platform works is it’s purely designed for Statement of Work engagements, end to end lifecycle, so it naturally pushes a path that is genuine outsource service delivery, with milestones, with the right contracts, with the correct supplier onboarding, full audit trail, on change request and everything that you’re doing, flowing through to payment and how that’s payment against milestones, etc., etc. But I would always encourage organizations to think about it at the beginning, this whole concept of work, not worker, in the sense of basically, what is the most effective way to get a piece of work done, not just from a compliance point of view? Should they be thinking about this, but from a strategic and pragmatic work delivery angle, if it’s best to do it through contractors, and you need to make sure that they are, you’ve run IR35 assessments and all that sort of thing, then absolutely, that’s what they should be doing his best to hire permanent headcount, then again, that’s their strategic decision. If it genuinely will be best delivered as an outsourced work package to a service provider to be delivered on specified outcomes and deliverables, then, that decision, if that happens up front, then I think the company are in much better position to do that effectively, and to be on the right side of it. Because everything from that start requirement should be focused around is clearly being a project that you’re outsourcing to be delivered by a supplier. And it shouldn’t really matter which individuals are doing it because you’re passing the liability for delivery of that project, and potentially penalties or the potential to make a loss if they get it wrong, as you said, over to the supplier. And so obviously, having the right contract is important, having the right structure of contracts. I don’t think that’s the biggest problem for people personally, again, you’ve got more expertise than I have. But I think the point you mentioned about the delivery being consistent with how its contracted. That’s definitely requires this kind of culture shift. But do you think mean, firstly, would you agree with regards to starting in the right place? And if so, do you think that is naturally going to help that process? 

Matt Fryer:          25:11     Yeah, I totally agree. And we are seeing businesses becoming far more strategic on this. And this is another output of the IR3 were they’ve been doing, though. But it’s the first time that a lot of businesses really analyze the I call it off payroll spend, you know, so where have we got people doing things for us that aren’t on our payroll. And they’re starting to understand that some of that comes directly as contractors, some comes through agencies, some comes through outsource or service providers. So businesses are now even though some of the more advanced ones are starting to build on almost strategic decision making trees. So we’ve got a project in the pipeline, how are we going to go and deliver this and we got resource, permanent resource we can reposition for a period of time? Do we want to go to an agency and get some agency temps? Do we want some contractors in place? Or do we want to just outsource the whole thing to somebody else? And as soon as you start thinking at that high strategic level, depending on which bucket you go down, you can start out policies and processes in place to make sure that you are actually buying what you intended at a strategic level to buy. And there’s a big piece of work, but education across the business across procurement and eternal recruitment, particularly, if it’s an agency spend, these are the supplies, we use this, these the agreed contracts, this is the way we manage and treat the people. And this is how the typical project should be run. If he’s outsourced services, and maybe HR internal recruitment, you’re not involved anymore. This is your one gig. We’ve got standardize procurement process, we can track and log everything through a system, we can report on it. And we can help you know that those hiring managers who are dealing with shouldn’t say hiring managers that in that instance, but those dealing with the service provider shouldn’t be treating that very differently to the hiring managers on the internal recruitment side dealing with contractors. So yeah, just start at the top. And that’s a very different approach than a business saying, Let’s go down the SLW route to fix the IR35 problems. That’s where you’re gonna get into difficulties, I think.

Jonny Dunning:   27:26     Yeah, clearly you can see why some companies might think that that’s a good idea, or think that’s an easy fix. But it’s just a world of problems. And ultimately, what they’d be doing is misusing an effective work delivery channel, that if they were a bit more organized, and a bit more strategic, should be part of their resourcing and workforce mix effectively, or could be a very, very valuable part of it. I mean, if you look at that belief spend matters, quote, that services, procurement equates to roughly four times the spend of contingent workforce, on average, most organizations. So it’s big, its massive, and procurement, it used to dealing with statements of work, they’re used to procuring services in that way, where it’s clear deliverables, tracking those deliverables, payment on deliverables. So I think there’s a significant role that procurement can play in this education, and helping facilitate that process. And even down to helping by managers, right requirements. HR, often helping people write job specs, often they’ll have a catalog of job specs, services procurement is so nuanced, every project is different, you can’t really work in that way. But there were certain fundamental things about how you write a requirement that make it an effective requirement or compliant requirement. And actually something where you’re going to get what you need to have done, done. So I think the principle I always take is, if people are approaching it, honestly, from a business perspective as the best way to get the work done, as we said, if they start with that frame of mind, they’re far less likely to go wrong. And if they decide this is going to be delivered as an outsourced Statement of Work delivery, then they need to have a clear process to actually take that through to fruition. And, but it is, you know, this, this whole education side of the market is something that companies have got to want to do. And I think, my expectations were that when I 35 came into the private sector, it would massively accelerate the kind of acceptance of statement of work as a viable way to get things done in a way that needs to be done properly, the way that people were already doing it, but also recognizing the risk in the way that they were already doing statement work where some of it wasn’t true statement work. But I’d say looking at the market, what’s actually happened is, for a period of time after IR35 went live, there was just a scramble, and people weren’t really worried about that they almost switched off to it because they’ve got this obvious burning problem. That’s hard to sort out anyway, because IR35 is complex legislation. It’s not completely black and white. There’s been some criticism about the way the government’s test tool works and things like that. But people were just focused on, we have to sort this out. And a lot of companies, a lot of big organizations made kind of quite sort of blanket decisions around the use of PSCs and doing the status determinations. But now, I think through addressing this further risk, it’s become very apparent that organizations are suddenly jumping on this now. But it’s not just because they’re looking at the additional risk that they’ve already got. It’s because they’re saying, Well, actually, we need clear ways to get things done. Because in some cases, you may have seen this. Organizations are saying everyone’s got to go, PAYE and not everybody wants to. 

Matt Fryer:          30:36     Yeah, I think it’s a watershed moment probably taken a bit too far. But it has caused businesses just to stop and pause and think about, how are they going to get projects done in future, businesses typically may have jumped straight to a recruiter, instead of only five contractors come into IT department and deliver this project IR35, as resulted in that now, I mean with risk onto an IR35 review, potentially increasing pay rises dealing with contractor queries. And we’ve seen some businesses, particularly in financial services is showing enough. Probably understandable, because they’re used to dealing with risks and the risk averse, saying, actually, I’m going to ban the use of those personal service companies. Now, we don’t want to go through all that rigmarole. We’re going to engage with large consultancy businesses. And that I don’t think that’s purely due to the IR35 risk. But they’re obviously procuring services in a different way now, because and they’ve continued to do that, which is interesting, because your point earlier, Johnny, that’s probably costing them far more to go to the big consultancy businesses and get projects done rather than use contractors. So you know, there’s something going on, though, in that still doing that. And they’ve been doing it for a couple of years, and they haven’t reversed their decision insistency in the future, whether that there is a flip like, but essentially, this is your longer term view point, isn’t it that you mentioned earlier? What’s the market going to look like in the future? I think it’s far more evolved in the US, isn’t it, you sustain that work? I’ve seen providers or statement of work in the US, particularly in the agency sector, we’re starting to see them morph now, some big agencies now have consultancy project arms to them. So they can clearly see that that’s the way that things are going. And they are looking to build up capability to provide consultancy rather than labor. Some of them been doing it for donkey’s years. But there’s more and more that particularly, some are coming to us for advice, how do we do this? And the biggest challenge for me is what why are you doing it? Are you doing it to try and offer an IR35 solution to clients? In which case you need to have a real think about whether that’s right thing for you to do it? Or actually do you see an opportunity to enhance your margin. Essentially, if you’re a service provider, taking on more risks, doing it properly, offering a statement of work rather than just bums on seats, there’s a real commercial benefit for you doing so. And a lot of them are in that latter camp. They think now that that old recruitment model is still, obviously still relevant in the market, still a massive sector. But I think they’re starting to look in the future and thinking actually packaging up Statement of Work, packages about outsource services is where we want to be as well. And IR35 is a catalyst for that, but I think there was the direction of travel, we will go in anyway.

Jonny Dunning:   33:49     Yeah, I agree. It’s interesting what you say about the US progress, because I think withIR35, the pressure from IR35 in the UK. And additionally, the pressure from Brexit, causing talent shortages. I personally think that the UK will end up at the front end of the market, even if it’s only for a relatively short space of time, in terms of the sophistication and maturity of utilizing true SOW models. And obviously, you’ve got legislative changes in places like Germany that started to come in now other places in Europe, and obviously California, where they’re addressing this kind of miss classification, co-employment as they might call it over there. But I’ve seen some decent stuff going on in US but I’ve seen quite a lot of sophistication starting to come in very rapidly in the UK. But as you say, it’s down to the if kind of recruitment organizations or intermediary organizations are starting to want to provide these services. The question is why? And I think one of the reasons is because these organizations are good at solving problems that a client can come to them with messy problem. And they’ve got the expertise and they utilize the right technology. And they and they make sure the ball doesn’t get dropped. And they fix the problem and make give a nice solution around it. And clients are genuinely they want help with this problem. So they want help with managing IR35 on the one hand and managing their contracts populations. That’s an addition to the existing contingent workforce models that are out there with specialist providers like yourselves, where you’re advising, particularly around the legal and compliance issues on IR35. But again, statement of work and services, procurement is another way that they can get work done. And I tend to refer to some of these recruitment intermediaries as kind of Workforce Solutions providers, because what they do now is actually pretty broad, some of them, but it’s still built around expertise process and the use of the right technology in the main. And so I feel like the clients are asking for these services. I certainly know that within the kind of RFPs that come out to these big managed service providers, services procurement statement of work is in pretty much all of the big ones now, whereas even two years ago, it was far, far less noticeable. So I do think there’s a real demand from the clients. But it comes in different shapes and sizes. In some cases, it’s just take our whole services procurement spend, we want you to wrap a process and technology around it and just manage the whole thing for us. That’s why we call it a services procurement, MSP. And then you’ve got what I would call Statement of Work management, which is where you’ve got intermediaries helping lots of multiple mid-sized clients managing problems they’ve got with pockets of tailspend, that may or may not be compliant, that need to be SoW, delivered in the right way, versus new areas where they’re looking to deliver projects or outsource services, where they want to go to a provider and have that kind of wrapped up in a service. And then you’ve got what you describe is the kind of projects and consultancy type services, which is almost like a little bit of a, there’s a sliding scale between a recruitment organization and a management consultancy on the other end. And that’s an interesting trend that we’re kind of seeing in the market. But clearly, it’s an opportunity for some recruitment organizations to move up the value chain, where they’re delivering expertise, they might start bringing on in house expertise, project management offices and things like that, then scales up into these true project delivery scenarios, where clients are just saying, rather than us worrying about that, we’re just going to give it to you just get it done and you take the risk. Would you would you agree with those drivers? Are there any other drivers you’re seeing around that?

Matt Fryer:          37:27     Yeah, I agree with that. I think we can see the growth in the gig economy growth and flexible work here. And that’s obviously driven by this two things driving that. One is people probably have bread propensity now to want to work for themselves. So you know, there’s more self-employed out there. But also there’s a growing trend of businesses, not wanting to own staff, but use them, quiet of course, we’re looking at it. But that core headcount of permanent employees is probably coming less than less than businesses are using flexible resource or outsourced service providers to flex up and flex down instantly within Brookson we had a board meeting recently where we know we’ve got lots of IT projects on the horizon. Do we bring in loads more permanent headcount into the it function? Or do we start to use outsourced service providers who are quite nuanced and specialized and technical, and you can start to pick a different provider based on, on the specific project that you want to run. So, I think we are becoming a far more flexible labor market in the UK. And the use of use of agencies has driven that, but also think there’s a role to play here for outsourced service providers to help businesses flex up and flex down or deliver projects without incurring permanent headcount. But there’s a clear dynamic there. And obviously, she’s coming in at the time that IR35 is hit with a pandemic, there’s a bit of a perfect storm that some of those are still battle scarred from. But once that settles down, I think we’ve got quite an interesting market out there.

Jonny Dunning:   39:11     Yeah, I totally agree. Working models are definitely changing the acceptance of different working models has definitely increased COVID has definitely had a huge effect on that. Everyone’s working from home during the first lockdown, you know, what are people actually doing? Are they working are they are they sat there, you know, visible on teams, but watching Netflix is, you know, hard for people to say. So, this whole idea of, you know, you might be doing childcare, or you might be looking after an elderly relative, you might be doing this, that the other. When you do the work isn’t as important it’s what you’re delivering that’s important, and that it’s on time and its good quality, and it’s to budget and all that sort of thing, which is starting to move towards these kind of deliverable outcomes. The gig economy is definitely forced out as well pushed towards that where it’s this chunking work up into gigs or tasks or segments or quantifiable units that are actually being delivered. And I think what you said about the perm headcount decreases or less reliance on that. It’s interesting. I think also, when you look at it from the angle of like PLCs don’t want to report headcount increases, whereas actually, from a, from a financial point of view, if they’re getting more work done with outsourced service providers, or it just frees up that that problem around, “Oh, hang on what’s happening with the headcount?” Do you think it presents opportunities for further change in the sense that you talked about this kind of increased acceptance of outsourced service delivery? Do you think maybe some of the people that were traditionally one-man band PSE contractors, will maybe get together and form smaller consulting businesses to take on the opportunity that’s being presented by the big guys kind of hoovering stuff up at the moment?

Matt Fryer:          40:51     Yeah, but back to attacking point here, obviously, the IR35 changes only impact medium and large size businesses in the UK. So if you’re a small business, and you’re using contractors, then the IR35 rules don’t apply to you. So, a small on solvency firm, who is engaging with limited company contractors, may well find themselves in quite an interesting position in that, they ask the consultancy firm don’t have to worry about IR35 rules, whereas the individual contractors do. And it’s interesting HMRC are very clear that they’re not intending to change the rules for small businesses. So there’s an opportunity there for small niche consultancy businesses to effectively eliminate the IR35 headache from themselves and from their client if things are structured correctly. Admittedly, it’s still individual contractors that need to manage their IR35 risk, and they should be doing that properly, but also maintains the status quo that we have. [unclear 41:52] the rule change.

Jonny Dunning:   41:56     And is that something that HMRC are not willing to change indefinitely? I thought it was like for the first 12 or 18 months or something like that.

Matt Fryer:          42:07     Yeah. Originally, they said, would come back and revisit it. There was a there was a question asked only last week on HMRC and doing a series of webinars, which are just Q and A’s. And somebody asked that specific question, when are you intending to roll the roles out to small businesses? And the response was, we currently don’t have any plans to do this. So it feels like that’s off the table now for HMRC. Now, it’s interesting, because what one argument is, well, there isn’t a level playing field. If you’re a medium sized consultancy, you’ve got to manage the IR35 risk yourself. Whereas you may be competing against a smaller consultancy, who doesn’t and has got contractors who are perhaps not adequately managing their own IR35 risk and therefore are able to provide their services, perhaps cheaper, because they’re not paying the right amount tax. So there’s not a level playing field. Now, in terms of competition. The flip side of it is I think government is saying, “We admit that it’s hard to manage IR35. So we don’t want to burden small businesses with it.” So there’s a balancing act to play there.

Jonny Dunning:   43:16     You mentioned with regards to the risks to the end customer, that in that scenario, were they using a smaller supplier who could be effectively doing that kind of pre IR35 contracts a bit. So they are absolved of risk. The risk is with the individual contractors, how, surely in some cases, the client is going to end up liable if they’re using smaller suppliers?

Matt Fryer:          43:45     Yeah, it’s a difficult one. So we need to go right back to the IR35 rules. So, if IR35 applies if there’s an individual who is obligated to or actually provides their personal services to apply and through their own limited company. So that’s the definition of a PSC. It’s a quite common noun term personal service company. It is a personal service company in a supply chain. Someone if not everyone’s got an element of IR35 risk, and I have 35 risk only really crystallizes if the contractor is deemed to be an employee. So there’s a whole different podcast on this but if someone is a disguised employee and pays your own should be paid on that their earnings, so who’s responsible for determining that he was responsible for paying and as part of what we talked about earlier, you’d look at who is the individual providing that service to and he can the smaller consultancy, so the fewer individuals in that pool of contractors, the more likely it probably will be that it’s an individual providing their services to a client. So you can get quite hard to demonstrate if there’s only one or two people working for a consultancy business, it could be hard to demonstrate that you’re not actually buying the services of an individual. Whereas obviously, if you’re contracting with a large global corporate consultancy business, it’s very easy to demonstrate that it’s not personal service that’s required. So yeah, but I was over generalizing maybe a little bit. If structured correctly, there’s opportunities for small businesses to take some market share. I think clients who have got the head round that might see that as perhaps a bit risky for them. And we are in some cases like that we are seeing clients saying, “We’re not sure whether we’re the party responsible for making the assessment or not. But we’re going to do it anyway. Because we’ve done it for 500 contractors over here, we’ve got a process to do it, we’re just going to run you through a normal process and give you that SDS.” That means we’re covered. And that works, in some instances is conflict, because the outsourced service provider perhaps has a different view on the IR35 status.

Jonny Dunning:   46:11     Yeah, I think that’s a really, really interesting area, in the sense that the idea of running a status determination, when it’s a statement of work delivery, it was a clearly an outsource piece of work, that feels conflicted to me. And so when you’re talking about that situation there where an end client says, “Not sure about this, I’m going to take the low risk approach, and I’m actually going to run an SDS determination myself” through somebody like you guys, we’ll do it themselves, whatever they might do. And so there’s a risk that they could come up with a different determination to the supplier, firstly, but also, I feel like there’s this kind of confusion about running status determinations when there was a statement of work involved, because from one side of it, you could look at it and go, ‘Yeah’, but it’s the lowest possible risk approach. But for me, I look at it and say, if it’s a statement of work, it was an outsource project is going to be delivered by supplier to clear milestones under a statement of work, you shouldn’t be doing a status determination. And actually, if you do, isn’t that potentially going to raise red flags and create unnecessary problems with HMRC whereas it’s unnecessary in that circumstance?

Matt Fryer:          47:27     Yeah. And I think there’s sort of two areas to look at here. One is, who is the client, and that’s what we were talking about earlier, who’s receiving the personal service of individual. And a statement of work can help say, actually, it’s not an individual providing services here, it’s an outsource project as a service delivery. But the other gray area in here is that definition I talked about earlier around a PSC. So if a PSC exists, and someone has to do a status determination, and when you go back to the legislation the PSC exists, where an individual personally provides or is under an obligation to personally provide services. So where you’ve got one man limited company, it probably going to be very difficult to persuade HMRC that there isn’t an element of personal service there. And it certainly is an individual person provided their services, even if it’s structured as a statement of work contract that they’re looking at and say, “Well, it was always Joe Bloggs that turned up every day. I know he had a right to substitute. But he did actually personally provide his services.” So, this is an untested. And this is why some of those larger businesses are saying, “There’s an individual, they’re working through their own limited company”, someone’s going to have to do a status determination, we’re going to do it. Now, if you have a statement of work, it’s highly likely that the IR35 decision will point to it being outside IR35. So I’m not a disguised employee. So I think this is where businesses are saying, “Look, we’re worried about who’s gonna do an SDS is outside anyway. So we’re just going to do one because it extinguishes our obligation, just in case we haven’t. If we didn’t do one, and we should have done more, we’re probably in a worse position than issuing the SDS” and I know it’s outside, it’s very firmly outside because it’s clearly a statement of work that we’re dealing with here. And so, again, this is a whole area of potential confusion, we might see some case law in the future, we might see some further guidance in the future. But it’s certainly, a good issue for you use a flag. But given the uncertainty given the gray area, it’s very hard on [unclear 49:46] not to issue an SDS where they think they might have to. But I take your point on that, in doing so, you straight away you’ve admitted you are the client, and you bring it on the risk that comes with it. So there’s no right answer to that one. And you could probably tie yourself in knots with technical arguments one way or the other. I think is one to keep an eye on is perhaps as far as I probably go at this point.

Jonny Dunning:   50:16     Like you said earlier with regards to the be interesting to see what happens over the next six to 12 months. That’s the sort of area where it’ll be really interesting to see how it kind of shakes out. And just in terms of the use of statement of work as a work delivery model, the kind of cleaning up of services, procurement to make sure that statement work, really is statement of work. And the implications around Statement of Work with very small service providers, or one-man band, limited company, specialist providers, and how that kind of shakes out. And I think with regards to all the risks involved, and the way that it’s processed, again, it comes back to what was the intention in the first place, if the intention in the first place was to get around IR35, it’s probably going to be messy is probably not going to end well. If the intention in the first place was to genuinely outsource a piece of work to get it done, delivered by a service provider and for them to take the risk of doing it for a set price or an agreed price. And then I think most organizations should find themselves, they do it correctly ending in a pretty good position. But I also think that, you know, coming back to this strategic decision making process about how to do a piece of work, it is very pragmatic, to be able to say, “Right, this is what we got to do, I can break that down into a series of tasks. So in my department, I know that to fit in with the overall company objectives, my department needs to achieve x. To do that, I’ve got these three steps to get there. And I can wrap that up into three projects that I can outsource and get somebody to deliver them, I’ll get multiple quotes, we’ll go through a competitive bidding process. And I’ll know how much it will cost for me to achieve my objective.” And that’s very pragmatic. Somebody might look at it and go, “Yeah, but it’s more expensive to outsource it.” But is it I would argue, because if you just got time materials on the case, how well is that going to be managed and monitored? And does anyone even talk about the actual objective? So I think it’s a very pragmatic way to get work done. That’s not to say it’s better than other ways of getting work done. Because there’s clearly going to be situations and work scenarios where it’s much better to do it using contractors. And there’s gonna be other situations where it’s much better to use your perm headcount or resource, but bearing in mind the confusion that you’re seeing in the market, do you think there is a significant education required for people to be able to utilize statement of work effectively? Or do you think there are parts of companies that are already doing it very well and it’s just new for some areas?

Matt Fryer:          52:54     Yeah, I think we touched on earlier in procurement. If you have a procurement function in your business, you’re probably using statement of work effectively, you might be able to improve, you may not and where you’ve got internal recruitment, dealing with agencies, you probably using contractors very well, I think where the gap is, is those two functions, crossing over that strategic level. So procurement very much work in silos, procuring services, clearance statement of work, internal recruitment HR go and find contractors. And until so the experience I’ve seen from some clients is until you bang their heads together on an IR 35 problem, that haven’t really bang together previously, because I wouldn’t need to. So I think the key to this is probably your in house recruitment and procurement functions working closer together at a strategic level, because there may be some instances where there is hidden labor supply. Well, actually, let’s move our procurement, put it in with internal recruitment. There may be internal recruitment incorrectly or perhaps not effectively using contractors for about over procurement. So yeah, I think, certainly from, again, an off payroll consideration. There’s a role for both HR internal recruitment and procurement to work together on that. And I think that’s probably my biggest observation. Businesses have well-functioning departments, perhaps not speaking together as often as they should be, and working as closely together as they should. But I’m starting to see that more of the happen.

Jonny Dunning:   54:37     Yeah, that’s a really interesting point, because maybe an unintended beneficial consequence of the IR35 reforms is actually within companies bringing together those internal recruitment HR and talent functions with procurement in a more joined up way, because ultimately when you look at it from a strategic workforce planning point of view, that’s always a problem. Because who owns which part of the workforce? Where’s it centralized? I’ve got procurement managing services, and you’ve got internal recruitment, managing, or HR managing contractors and perm employees, you know, how do you centralize, how you’re utilizing all the available resources that you have to hand? So I think that is potentially a real strategic benefit for companies because, these departments have to talk to each other IR35 means they have to address it, you’ve got, again, I agree with you that often this feels like the problem initially falls into the hands of legal and finance departments, where people just go into compliance, government tax issue, you deal with it, but then in terms of operationally executing it, then it’s going to obviously fall to these departments as well. And then filtered down to stakeholders that are actually buying services or buying the use of contractors or staff within the business. And it’s an interesting point, I hadn’t really considered that but because it’s always a problem that comes up when you look at it from a strategic workforce planning point of view. But yeah, that’s a really interesting point.

Matt Fryer:          56:10     And we do see working really well, we’re procurement and HR are working together on the IR35 Project. This is where we’re seeing the businesses come out of that with is our matrix, or buying off payroll services into the business. And it’s very clearly defined, everyone’s got roles and responsibilities. And conversations are happening around systems. How do we corral all this? How do we control it? How do we report on it? How do we make sure that it’s being governed correctly? And IR35 is the driver for that, but it’s far more benefits coming out of that more structured approach?

Jonny Dunning:   56:47     Yeah, absolutely. And I guess that’s where when you talked about kind of guided buying when it comes to resources, and the kind of concept of decision trees, maybe, that’s really what’s driving those complex conversations, because loads of companies talk about it settled out of management, and lots of workforce. Service Providers talk about it as well. But the instances where organizations are doing this effectively, in my opinion, are still fairly few and far between. So if that’s driving that conversation around, if it’s a permanent headcount, it goes through workday, if it’s contingent worker, it goes into the VMS. If it’s an SOW, it goes into a specific, SOW management platform, that’s a conversation that if there’s a clear process around it, and then it’s going into segregated technologies, there’s far less likely to go wrong, there’s a clear structure and process and each one clear governance and each one, and they’re separated. It’s just different buying channels effectively for the person that the stakeholder that wants to get the work done. So that’s really encouraging. And kind of ties into my last point, really, which was just kind of loop things up. And we’ve talked about this a little bit already. But just in terms of your predictions for what you think the next six to 12 months will bring, when we look at kind of off payroll, resourcing and workforce delivery, what do you think we’re likely to see in the next six and then the next 12 months?

Matt Fryer:          58:14     Yeah, so I think we will probably, we’re yet to see what business as usual looks like and what good practice looks like. I thought we’d start to see it coming through now. But I think, particularly in large businesses, people have been dealing with IR35. And now taking a breather from it. Whatever solution they’ve got in place that even if it might not be adequate, or optimized, they’ve got something in place. So I think we’ll see still see a continuation of some of those blanket bands, we might still see some businesses not quite getting it right for perhaps another six to 12 months. But in that time, a lot of this will be governed by how HMRC police and enforce it. If HMRC don’t go and see any businesses, don’t enforce compliance. There’s a danger that everyone forgets about IR35 risk, and we fall back into being an unmanaged risk in some businesses, in which case, I think some of the positives coming out of it might be lost. So, I’m hopeful that businesses continue to think through how do they make management IR35 business as usual. I hope in doing so they continue to understand that it’s not just labor supply chains, where you’ve got that risk, it also assists into stable work and outsourced service provision. And I therefore hope that businesses continue to work together and anyone providing services in their business who’s not on the payroll or employed, you need a working party that’s looking at that as a cross skilled resource. So, we really do foresee HR internal recruitment and procurement being a lot more closer, obviously, way buying goods you’ve got, you don’t need to worry about this. But if you bind services that involve people, I think, there’s almost a new function of business here. And I don’t know what it’s called. But it’s the off payroll function. You know people who we aren’t paying on our payroll, we need a team of specialists from a strategic level more than anything to make sure we’re getting best value, we’re getting the best resource. And we’re getting the best value for our project spend. So, I can see, and this will take more than six to 12 months, I think, Johnny, but I certainly can see the role of procurement, the role of internal recruitment crunching together, beyond the company’s labor time. There’s lots of stuff around IR35. And I don’t know all the risks on the downside. But the positive side here is, I think, more strategic thinking around off payroll spend.

Jonny Dunning:   1:01:01  I agree. I think that’s the right way to look at it, I think that’s a very likely outcome that organizations are finding themselves into forced into solving this problem, it’s a tricky problem to solve. Even just identifying services spent managing that properly is something that’s new for a lot of companies, but it’s supported by the drivers they’ve got from a regulatory point of view, is supported by the market drivers where COVID has caused these additional cost pressures. So organizations can’t just say, “Well, yeah, my services spend is to budget, and so that’s fine.” No, you need to know if there’s a risk there or not. And actually, what are you getting for your money? So they these factors are driving people to have to address it. And they need to address what the most effective way is to get work done using all available resource types they have? I think, you know, when you talk about what, what function is going to look after this? That’s a really interesting question. That’s definitely a whole other series of podcasts as to how that looks, is it the growth of the Strategic Workforce Planning function, had Bruce Morton from the leaders on a while back, and he talked about work design architects, as being a kind of a job title of the future. I think there’s all sorts of interesting kind of options there. But ultimately, it does need the business to collaborate in a strategic way to answer the question, what is the most effective use of our resources? So I think it’s very exciting. One point, just to kind of go back to that you made there. Do you really think there’s a chance that HMRC won’t follow up effectively on it? I mean, surely, with the amount of money that’s been spent on COVID, the requirement for tax revenues, the kind of the effort that’s gone into making this happen against a lot of opposition, do you think this surely, there is not a chance they’re not going to effectively follow up on it?

Matt Fryer:          1:02:43  You would think so. And most of us would hope so. But history tells me that the reason they’ve changed the rules is because they didn’t police the old rules adequately enough. We’ve seen other rule changes recently, particularly in the agency world for supply of contractors, around use of sole traders around expenses in umbrella companies. And these rules came in with a big bang to try and stop my clients. And there hasn’t been much evidence of compliance action. So quite often HMRC at a policy level will make a rule change as a deterrent, rather than as a method of collecting taxes. So, there’ll be a statistician, somewhere within government that says, if 80% of people comply with this, we’ll collect roughly what we expect to collect, there might be 20% but [unclear 1:03:36]. Well, it’s going to be too hard, take too long, cost too much for us to police it. So, the cynic in me thinks that, that might happen. Hopefully, it doesn’t, because they have been very public about acknowledging the fact that they’ve created new teams, they’ve got new staff, and they have got people already with some of the larger businesses, they are already having conversations with HMRC, about how they’ve responded to this. So, certainly want to keep an eye on but I’d quite like it. If HMRC find bad practice. I’d quite like them through naming and shaming talking about it. It takes several years to get a tax tribunal and for new case, law and precedent to be set. So all those lawyers have got to work with guidance. And what HMRC have been quite useful in doing recently, as you may have seen spotlights that they announced spotlight and nice announcements highlighting what they see, tax avoidance to be so further HMRC guidance, some spotlight articles on what that looks like. I think that will help us all understand what a low risk environment looks like. Some sort of naming and shaming or certainly, now as someone who’s clearly out abusing the system. You want to see them get a slap on the knuckles but yeah, time will tell on that one, there is a danger that we hear nothing from HMRC. Now, and they essentially just see this as a deterrent and don’t want to invest the time to enforce it. Which would be a shame because we know from experience, just results in an unlevelled playing field for businesses. 

Jonny Dunning:   1:05:16  Yeah. I don’t have the level of expertise in dealing with HMRC that you do. But I my kind of expectations are that they’ll be absolutely all over it. And but as you say, time will tell, but it’s really interesting, I really appreciate you taking the time to discuss this, as we kind of said, a couple of points through this conversation. There are so many other things that we could talk about in more detail. And I may possibly come back to you at some point in the future to address some of these points on another episode if possible. But I’m really appreciate your input and your feedback. And I think it’s great to genuinely see some potential positives that we can both clearly recognize in the market that could come out of these changes. I think there’s a clear need for organizations to take this seriously and address this, rather than just the very obvious risk that the maybe there was the kind of initial knee jerk reaction. And hopefully, that can lead to a more holistic viewpoint on how to effectively resource in the long term, but really, really interesting to chat. Before you go and so we started with a little bit of conversation about the football. And we and we ended with some predictions for the next six to 12 months. I can’t remember when the first games for the World Cup get underway. It might even be like September, October, is it something like that?

Matt Fryer:          1:06:39  Yeah, it’s coming up, isn’t it? It’s an interesting one, it’s only 12 months until the World Cup finals. Normally, you’ve got to wait two years. 

Jonny Dunning:   1:06:47  Yeah, I was gonna ask you any quick predictions on that based on the performance of the euros, where’s England in the rank something like fourth in the world now or something like that?

Matt Fryer:          1:06:59  Yeah, I’m gonna go with England, you know, and this is based on I think the FA put running place in 2010. That said, we will get to be semifinals of the year old 2020. And we’ll get to the finals of the World Cup in 2022. So they’d be that prediction for the year I was just gone. So I think there’ll be the prediction of getting to the finals and we may actually win it. So, I’m going to go bold and I’m going to go with that Johnny.

Jonny Dunning:   1:07:27  Excellent stuff and no doubt you can take that into your coaching and get the lads, you’re doing the football. We’re really revved up in anticipation. 

Matt Fryer:          1:07:35  Yeah, you never know I have a future England star on my hands. 

Jonny Dunning:   1:07:37  I really appreciate you taking the time to chat. Thanks so much for that, Matt. And, yeah, hopefully catch up with you again soon. Great. Thanks, me, Johnny. 

Matt Fryer:          1:07:41  I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been interesting, just getting my head out of the technical details and talking a bit more broad. So I’ve enjoyed it. Yeah. Happy to do another one. Cheers Jonny. 

Jonny Dunning:   1:07:57  Thanks very much.