“How do we get into a position where businesses like ours are considered when legislation is created?”

There are two things that need to happen. First we have to be counted, literally. We are not. The official UK government economic taxonomy is grounded in its 1948 definitions and has not been revised in over a decade. Your work is likely categorised as “Other business support service activities not elsewhere classified.” If it feels like the digital economy doesn’t register to policymakers, it’s because it really doesn’t. See https://idea15.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/officially-your-work-on-the-web-doesnt-matter-heres-why/

Second, and I am getting more vocal about this by the year, is that nearly twenty years into our profession’s existence, we still refuse to organise and professionalise ourselves on any cross-platform level. We have no Royal College of Web Developers, or Chartered Institute of Web Designers, to provide us with professional development and a legislative voice. The sneering astonishment which some members of the accountancy profession registered about us not knowing about the law was because they have multiple professional societies and guilds spoon-feeding them this information. We have Twitter and the occasional after-work meetup in the pub. Because we don’t respect ourselves as profession, we are not respected back. We need to professionalise – literally, profession-alise – and carry out our work with more structure than we have in the past.