Two new reports that highlight the growth of the freelance and self-employed workforce in both the UK and US also suggest that politicians and civil servants in both countries have little real understanding about the changing nature of work. According to the UK government’s regular Business Population Estimates report, the number of private sector businesses is at an all-time high, around 5.5 million, up by a million since 2010. Yet the report fails to distinguish between freelancers, the self-employed and traditional SMEs, except to omit firms that are too small to pay VAT from its numbers. The trade association IPSE estimates that there are some 4.6 million self-employed and freelance workers in the UK, yet the BPE report does not account for the overlap in numbers. Even within the BPE’s own numbers, there are suggestions that its conclusions do not match the data. The annual growth in non-employing businesses outstripped those who employed others by a factor of 6:1 and 76 percent of businesses did not employ anyone aside from the owner.