I get what you're saying, but contractors by their nature tend to be mobile and motivated by pay. This strongly increases the likelihood of an outflow, especial

I get what you're saying, but contractors by their nature tend to be mobile and motivated by pay. This strongly increases the likelihood of an outflow, especially if companies don't react to the extra taxes by raising pay. The effect is compounded because a) good techies really like to work with other good techies and b) losing most of the good ones also means losing all of the people who can recognize other good techies and hire competently and c) there's a scarcity of mentors too, impeding the ability of junior techies to develop. The UK is still a tech center in spite of Brexit. For now. I've worked in markets before where there's a scarcity of high end talent because it all got sucked away elsewhere and software-wise, these environments produced mediocre crap.