Update on the freelance file

The State Secretary sent a letter to the House of Representatives on 27 March 2025 about the progress of the VBAR legislation (Assessment of Employment Relationships and Legal Presumption (Clarification) Bill).  Which announced that the bill will be amended further to the recent ruling by the Supreme Court on Uber. Please see our previous newsletter for further details of this Supreme Court ruling.  

In the earlier version of the VBAR bill, "external entrepreneurship" was only included in the assessment of the employment relationship if the other criteria considered as part of the assessment resulted in a "tie". Given that in the Uber ruling the Supreme Court indicated that external entrepreneurship is not a subordinate criterion but a fully-fledged one that must be taken into account when making the assessment, the government has now stated that the bill will be amended accordingly. The Minister of Social Affairs and Employment, Eddy van Hijum, had already said that the web module and hetjuistecontract.nl (the right contract) took into account all the viewpoints of the Supreme Court and therefore there was no reason to take the web module offline.  

The government indicates that the VBAR legislation should enter into force on 1 January 2026. However, the government also recognises that this is a tight deadline. The amended bill will, in any event, be submitted to the House of Representatives before the summer.

The precise amendments to the bill have not yet been disclosed but the government states that it will be in line with current case law, including Uber. In all likelihood that will amount to a codification of the now familiar Deliveroo criteria.