The Work Agenda 2026 podcast series: Episode 03 – Preparing for increased contingent workforce red tape

The red tape and costs associated with a contingent workforce will be increasing throughout 2026 and beyond. We discussed the complex new requirements under the Employment Rights Act.

The Act also introduces significant reforms to the regulation of umbrella companies and new responsibilities for payroll tax compliance bite in April 2026. We also looked at the government’s plans to make right to work checks compulsory for wider working arrangements with the associated civil and criminal sanctions for non compliance applicable.

This episode is part of a mini-series covering the topics discussed at The Work Agenda 2026 conference, we hope you enjoy listening. Remember to share with colleagues and if you do have any comments, we would love to hear them.

Transcript

I'm Lucy Lewis and thanks for tuning in to one of our live podcast recordings from The Work Agenda 2026.

I was joined by Phil Swinburn from our Tax and Incentives team and Rose Carey from our Immigration team to discuss the rising red tape and costs for contingent workforces. We covered those really complex new Employment Act requirements for zero hours and low hours workers, up and coming changes to umbrella regulations, umbrella tax roll compliance and more immigration changes.
 
So hi, everyone. We've been chatting here saying you probably deserve a prize for coming to this session. When you look at all those glamorous things, and this is sort of not quite so glamorous. ⁓ And I'll make some introductions, but you'll see there's a degree of sort of stitching together some quite different things, but all under the same umbrella of actually having quite a big impact on contingent workers. So here we are.

Phil is a legal director in our tax team. Rose, a partner in our immigration team, as you know, I'm an employment lawyer and that gives you a clue about what we're going to talk to you about. So we're going to start talking about the umbrella company regulations, changes, payroll tax compliance. A fairly significant part of the session will be on that because that is actually happening in April and there are things that you need to think about doing and Phil's going to take you through those. 

For Rose and I, we're actually not quite as far along the line as we anticipated when we started planning this programme, ⁓ either on the expansion of the illegal working regime or on guaranteed hours notice of shifts under the Employment Rights Act. So in both those cases, the government is still consulting or not yet even started consulting when we look at guaranteed hours. So there will be an opportunity to meet with Lewis Silkin again to talk through some of the more practical consequences of that is quite difficult for us to do what we'd normally like to do, which is to give you some really practical insight. But we are going to take you through those things. So as promised, Phil's gonna start, he's gonna start talking about umbrella company regulations. 

Thank you. I am squarely within the unglamorous section, so apologies for leading you into a tax session to start with. I'm going to talk about the upcoming changes to the umbrella company rules for taxation. These rules are changing from the 6th of April, 2026, so there's a few months. Hopefully, if you're ⁓ dealing with umbrella companies, you've been aware that these have been in consultation and been discussed for a number of months now. And it was at the last budget in November where it was confirmed and draft legislation was provided. 

I'm going to split into three sections. So, I'm going to start with a bit of history, provide a bit of context about where these rules have come from, hopefully to understand a bit better the motivations and how they have an effect. I'll then talk about the rules themselves and then the responses, so some practical actions. So, to start off with a general principle, taxation, HMRC and the Treasury really like employment arrangements. And the reason they like employment arrangements is because the end user, client, withholds PAYE and NIC on payments to a worker. Nice and straightforward, hopefully that's not news to anyone. Employment tax accounts for about £500 billion of treasury receipts every year, so over half of treasury receipts, so it's such an easy way of collecting tax. And inquiring against clients, big companies, companies generally, is the easiest way to get money out of individuals and workers.

Consultancy arrangements are less preferred by the revenue, so an individual can interpose a Personal Services Company and use a Personal Services Company to provide services. And they can take dividends out of that company, claim extra deductions, maybe wind the company up and get capital treatment. So basically, effectively achieve a much better tax outcome. And so starting with a bit of history, 1999 Gordon Brown as Chancellor introduced the Inland Revenue Bulletin 35, so IR35. And the point of IR35 was the combat arrangements where you had, in the words of the Treasury at the time, an individual who was a worker, an employee who left work on the Friday and came back on the Monday as a contractor and achieved a much better tax result. And the way IR35 worked, and I'm sure this won't be news to anyone here, and we've been sort of dealing with the developments in recent years, is that it was the responsibility of the Personal Services Company, of the contractor, to make an employment status determination and determine whether this worker should effectively be paying tax at a similar rate or the same rate as an employee. And what this means is that every time the HMRC or Treasury want to inquire into an arrangement where they think there's a sort of dodgy employment status, they need to inquire into the Personal Services Company.

So if you're a large advertising agency and you engage 500 contractors, that's 500 inquiries for the revenue, that's 500 separate letters. So very difficult to, to enforce that. And they had lots of challenges with that. For a number of years, they spoke about reforming this in the lead up to 2020. So around 2018-19, they discussed changing those rules. There was a bit of a delay due to COVID, but from the 6th of April, 2021, the off payroll worker rules were introduced. And under the off-payroll worker rules, ⁓ medium and large companies were responsible for making that employment status determination. So they pushed that responsibility to the client, the end user, generally the bigger entity. ⁓ And in doing that, in my example with an advertising agency, if you've got 500 contractors, that's not 500 letters, that's one letter to your end user to say, what's your process? What's your due diligence when you engage a Personal Services Company? Have you met your compliance requirement? Have you passed down your status determination statement? All of those things. And there were three main effects of the off-payroll worker rules. So one sort of sledgehammer approach that some businesses take and some high profile businesses took was to say, okay, blanket assessment too difficult. These rules are too difficult to navigate.

So you're either all employees and if you want to use your Personal Services Company, even if there's a good reason for sort of commercial reasons, if you want to use your Personal Services Company, we're going to PAYE you. So, you know, a blanket approach, the revenue said that wasn't their intention. It did raise lots of money for the exchequer. They estimate that that change was worth about £3 billion in treasury receipts over five years. So yeah, one behavioural shift was blanket assessments. Another behavioural change was you know, doing things properly. Lots of legal fees, lots of fees for accountants, lots of status determinations, internal headaches, whose responsibility does it sit with? Is it HR, legal, finance, procurement? Do we even know where our contractors are within the business? And, you know, if we want to get this right, we might issue status determinations statements to all our contractors and, you know, ⁓ headache and lots of grumpy contractors.

And I see a few nods. These rules were, as I say, there were lots of legal fees, but there were lots of headache. And it was a challenging rule change, even though it was well-trialled. And the third behavioural change was increased use of umbrella companies. So one of the responses was for your end user to say, OK, well, we don't want to make all those status determinations. We don't want to have that headache. So what we'll do is we'll engage our workers through an umbrella company.  

And there might even be a Personal Services Company interposed in the middle, but look, it's not our problem. And that works in some cases. It doesn't get rid of IR35, or certainly didn't get rid of IR35, but it was one way of saying, well, we want you, umbrella company, to engage all these workers, and we don't want to have that headache anymore. So that was the behavioural change that these rules were coming to combat. And in that case, where a worker was engaged by an umbrella company as an employee or looked and felt like an employee, if there was no Personal Services Company interposed, it was the responsibility and the liability of the umbrella company to ensure PAYE was being operated correctly, NICs were being paid, and employer NICs were being paid. And in lots of cases, this worked, it solved lots of headaches with people.

There were some bad actors in the market, were bad practices and some of that bad practice was the end user wouldn't have to think too hard about this. The umbrella company would say to the end user, okay, we're doing everything properly, we're paying people subject to PAYE, NICS, et cetera. ⁓ And actually they weren't. And money was going, so 100 would go for umbrella company, from end users to umbrella company, and then maybe they'd pay it gross to the individuals and it would be a sort of different commercial arrangement than what the end user was aware of or sort of wilfully ignorant of potentially. Where those arrangements are challenged, the revenue can come against the umbrella company. But as we see with this IR35 legislation, where you're coming against a smaller party, it requires lots more inquiries and also involves inquiries with entities that are potentially a bit more agile, know, individuals and their PSCs can disappear. Umbrella companies, would you believe it, can also disappear and it was happening, have seen instances of that. And so from the 6th of April, 2026, the liability for PAYE will be joint and several, we'll start with this diagram on the right here, but with the client, the end user and the umbrella company. So if that umbrella company disappears, HMRC could come to the client for the PAYE and NICs.
 
There's slight nuance to this. So in situations where the contractual chain's a bit longer, you've got an umbrella company and an agency, not uncommon at all, where you've potentially got a recruitment agent and then a paying agent. The responsibility is slightly different and the liability isn't with the end user, the contractor. It goes to the next party in the contractual chain. That would change where, if this agency was, say, non-UK resident or had no UK presence then it would be a joint and several liability with the two UK entities. But you can see how ⁓ it expands HMRC's scope to combat these arrangements and find a party, hopefully in their case, the biggest fish in the chain for the PAYE and NICs. It's worth saying, before I come onto the actions, that I don't know if you use employers of record. Employers of record are basically employing entities that engage individuals.

Similar way to an umbrella company, but often they're used where you've got individuals in jurisdictions that you don't have an employing entity. An employer of record would be caught by these rules. They're pretty squarely within the definition of an umbrella company. And the final thing is these rules apply in all cases where an individual is employed by that umbrella company. But if there are arrangements where they're not employed by that umbrella company, but it would be reasonable to suppose that they would be, and I'll come on to what that might mean for an end user in a moment, then these umbrella company rules apply equally. So if there's some nice consultancy agreement that sits between these parties, but hey, if we looked through it, that would really be like an employment arrangement, then ⁓ these rules would apply equally. So how to respond to these rule changes. I'll get my notes out of this point, because there are a few points and I don't want to miss anything. ⁓ I think the first point is just procedural. It's about working out where in a business this sits.

I mentioned the multitude of departments that contractors and umbrella company arrangements can sit between. It's really important if you've got an IR35 process or a contractor process, that this is really built in alongside it. Because in different businesses, it's dealt with in different ways. I mentioned HR, finance, procurement. Sometimes we see businesses where you just don't know where your contractors are because some area of the business will go, oh yeah, we want this specialist. We'll engage them. It's really important to have processes in place.

And what those processes should include are, in the first instance, identifying where these rules apply and where they could apply within your business. So understanding this, understanding where this is the case, and then working out how to deal with it. The second point is about assessing existing arrangements. ⁓ And as part of that, it's really about speaking to the umbrella companies that you're engaging now once you work out where they are in the business.
Speaking to them and understanding what procedures they have in place for payroll, potentially asking them to evidence that, I would certainly suggest that, you know, we've got these 300 individuals that are provided by you, do you payroll them, can we see evidence? And that's an evidence on a sort of, in advance of these rules changing, but then also on a spot basis, I suggest in future, where you have a process where maybe quarterly or, you know, quarterly plus random occasions, you provide them with a list of names, relatively short notice and can understand and ensure that they're operating ⁓ PAYE and NICS correctly. ⁓ The third point I have here is about engaging with new intermediaries. So making sure you're doing your due diligence, making sure umbrella companies are equipped ⁓ to deal with their requirements under PAYE and NICS, asking for evidence of that and making sure your of RFP process, your onboarding process factors in this as an important step.

And I suspect it already is, and it's probably dealt with in a couple of lines of a contract that says, you know, we'll operate PAY in NICS. The difference when these rules come in is that you need to make sure they're doing it, and you need to ensure that you're dealing with ideally a reputable provider, someone that you really trust, and you've got, ⁓ you know, the right kind of protections to ensure that they are doing it. And if they're not doing it, there's recourse. And that's my fourth point here, just ensuring you've got contractual protections. So...

the difference between the umbrella company rules or certainly a key difference between the umbrella company rules and IR35 is that in these cases the payments from umbrella company to worker are you know you don't have sight of those payments necessarily. In an IR35 case you know you consider your PSC to be a genuine third party so you can pay them gross here you need to have the contractual agreement but you don't have sight of that so you need protections and that's where I suggest you know there's joint and several liability here, but I suggest that an end user should be trying to get indemnities and really robust wording in contracts with umbrella companies to ensure that they really are meeting their obligations. And then finally, I mentioned ongoing monitoring, spot checks ⁓ of PAYE records, annual, you want to see annual PAYE submissions, all of those things to ensure that you're comfortable that things are being done correctly.

The final point which may be slightly left field but you might consider to be appropriate in some cases and I don't quote me on this but I wouldn't expect it to be, if you've got all of those procedures in place, to be particularly expensive or onerous but insurance is becoming a bigger thing in the tax market and so that's one thing that you might consider where you literally don't have sight of those payments, you might have all the controls and things but if you want absolute belt and braces on that potential HMRC exposure, tax insurance could be one option.
I don't know if we have any umbrella company or intermediary representatives in the room today. I'll keep it very brief. I didn't see any on the attendee list, my main note for them is it's sort of their time to shine and to differentiate. What they should be doing is making your life as easy as possible, demonstrating an understanding of these rules, showing that they've got clear processes, assisting end users with... understanding their process so they can really stand out as compared with your cowboys of the umbrella company market. 

I'll hand over to Rose. 

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you. So we are going to look at the prevention of illegal working. So you'll know that you have to ensure that everybody who works for you is legally able to work in the UK. And if they do not have the right to work, then it is an offence. It's a criminal offence if you knowingly employ someone who doesn't have the right to work or even where ⁓ perhaps you don't know, but it should have been reasonably obvious that they didn't have the right to work.

That is a criminal offence. And then there's the civil penalty, which is what the home office tend to use. They rarely prosecute. And the civil penalty is where you unknowingly employ someone who doesn't have the right to work and you haven't conducted a compliant right to work check, or perhaps you haven't conducted a right to work check at all, then you are liable to that penalty.

In terms of the criminal offence, there is some personal liability for the individual responsible for the hire. So yes, somebody could go to prison in theory. If they knowingly employed someone who didn't have the right to work or if it was reasonably obvious, so they were negligent in that employment, then they could face ⁓ imprisonment of up to five years and the company could receive an unlimited fine. And then the civil penalty starts at £60,000.

It can be reduced if it's a first time offence, so if the employer hasn't received a civil penalty in the previous three years. And it can be reduced if there are mitigating factors. Now the statutory excuse gives you a defence against the civil penalty, but it only works if you've conducted the check correctly. So if you've carried out that right to work check in the way the Home Office asks you to do it.
And there's different ways you can do the right to work check. There's an online check. Now that is in most cases where somebody will have a visa. Then you will complete an online right to work check for them using something called a share code. Because now they don't have physical documents, they're given e-visas, so the status is electronic. You can conduct a manual check, and that's usually for British or Irish nationals where you see the actual passport.

And you may be able to use a digital checking service, identity checking service, but that's ⁓ only in the case of British and Irish nationals. So you can outsource part of the check to them. You still have to be satisfied though that they have the right to work because you are still liable even when you outsource part of the check to a provider.

And this is the position for employees. So anyone you employ in the UK, you have to make sure that they have the right to work in the UK.

So what's changing? Well, we had the new Border Security Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, received Royal Assent on the 8th of December 2025, so the very end of last year. And it has a new section, Section 48, that applies to all workers. So it's expanding it from employees to all workers ⁓ and self-employed contractors, subcontractors. So it's... including effectively probably anyone that's going to provide a service or work for you in the UK. It's that broad. And the liability arises where that person is individually providing those services. So they as an individual are providing services, providing work, even if you have no contract with them. ⁓ And even if you are unaware, they are providing that work for you, which is a bit worrying.

But this could be where perhaps somebody has subcontracted the service to someone else and you may not be aware of that, it doesn't matter, you're still going to be liable. So you need to make sure that they have the right to work, which is hard to do if you don't know that they're actually working for you. And that liability will cover the whole chain of contracts. So if you're the receiver, the recipient of that work, then ⁓ you are liable if you're in the middle and you're supplying somebody, you're liable. So the liability can actually apply now to multiple businesses ⁓ for the same ⁓ instance of illegal working. So it's very broad ⁓ and quite onerous on employers. You've got lots of changes coming down the line in employment law, but also immigration law as well this year.

It hasn't come into force yet. So the Act received royal assent on the 8th of December, but the section isn't in force yet. The government has just closed a consultation with employers on what effect this is going to have on their business and how will they conduct right to work checks. So we're expecting later on this year to see the section brought into force and then to see the guidance as to how the right to work checks are going to be completed what they expect of employers with this new system. So what's the impact for businesses? Gosh, well there's lots. There's ⁓ thousands potentially of more workers you might have to conduct right to work checks for, depending on the size of your business and the number of people you engage. There's also ⁓ increased exposure to prosecution, civil penalties. And if you have a sponsor licence, that could be impacted by those things. So if you were to be prosecuted or the business receives a civil penalty, that could have an impact on your sponsor licence. A sponsor licence is in place to help you recruit staff from overseas who need permission to work in the UK. So you use your licence to sponsor them so they can work for you in the UK. If you lose your licence because you've received a civil penalty, and that is a possibility, they can take a licence away when a civil penalty has been imposed. Then you would lose the ability to recruit staff from overseas and bring them to the UK. Anyone that's already sponsored by the business in the UK and working for you would lose their right to work for you in the UK if you lost your licence and then you would have to dismiss them, which brings in lot of employment law issues into play as well.

So there's lots going on there and lots of things to contend with in terms of the sponsor licence as well. Now usually they wouldn't revoke a licence for a one-off civil penalty, but it depends on the severity, it depends on the number of workers involved as well. If it's several workers, if you end up receiving several civil penalties, then yes, that is likely in that scenario you would lose your sponsor licence. And it's a damage to reputation as well. They have a name and shame policy, so they have a website where they publish the names of businesses that have been issued with a civil penalty. The media can pick up those stories as well. You probably all remember the story of Byron burgers many years ago, but they had some right to work issues and the home office conducted a raid and captured lots of people and then it all blew up and was, you know, actually their business never really recovered from that, those stories and that situation. So I think some of the things you can think about doing in terms of, you know, preparing for this is making sure that your right to work ⁓ checking processes are robust and are sufficient and are operating well. And then making sure that they are going to be able to cope with the increase in the number of workers that you're going to need to check when this piece of legislation comes into force. And then thinking about things you can do if you work with agencies about indemnities and warranties. But of course, that's not going to save your sponsor licence if you end up with a civil penalty.

You can also think about whether you need to ⁓ increase your training, whether you need to expand your training to other members of staff. So think about who in the business is responsible for right to work checks and deciding whether you need to increase the number of people with that responsibility and what training they need, making sure they've got the right training in place. And just conducting, I think, well, internal audits to make sure, go through your personnel files, make sure you have conducted right-to-work checks properly, and make sure that everything is in good order so you know that your systems and processes are robust enough to deal with this change. I think that's all I wanted to say on this. We are updating clients. We have a page on our website where we ⁓ update regularly with information on this ⁓ change. So when it comes into force, we will be notifying everybody through various forms, email alerts, and on our website as well.

I'm going to hand over to Lucy.

I mean, you'll see from the slides, we don't really know very much other than the outline complete chaos of all of this and we absolutely will meet again. We will meet again to talk about this, I'm sure. ⁓ You know, at some point in 2027, you'll have to do all of this. I think if you asked me, it's probably conditional and economic.

The economic environment at that point, will the government go ahead with it? Let's at happens in the consultation. As you know, it's zero hours and low hours workers, whatever that means. We now know it also covers agency workers that meet those criteria. And it, guaranteed hours, relates to people that are either on a zero hours contract or a low hours contract that then exceed the number of contracted hours. If they exceed the number of contracted hours over a reference period, probably 12 weeks.

You then have to offer them a new or varied contract reflecting the hours worked, maybe in a prescribed form, who knows, who knows how long you're have to give them to consider the offer. But we do know terms must be no less favourable, i.e. no less favourable than the terms they're on. That's particularly relevant with agency workers, because often you'll bring an agency worker in on a slightly higher day rate. That's just been the sort of nature of the market of agency workers. So if you end up being forced to offer a permanent contract, you may end up being forced to offer a permanent contract on the agency hour rates, TBC, how the government deal with that. I'm sure it'll be an issue that comes out of the consultation. The real sting in the tail, lots of you have heard me say this before, it's like totally bonkers that it's not a one-off process. So every single person you bring in will have a different start date, so a different review period. So you might bring in this person this week, there's another person next week. You've got to be able to cover and assess the hours each of those people have worked.

You need to make them an offer. If that offer then isn't accepted, if it is accepted but they're still low hours, you're just going to have to keep repeating the process and repeating the process and repeating the process. You're in this endless cycle of massive amounts of administration. You can use collective agreements to contract out. That's driving everybody towards sort of more unionized environment. But I think it's really juries out on whether unions are going to agree to contract out of these kind of arrangements. 

I think... you'd be much more likely to get some concessions around the review period, maybe one time off for not having to have this cycle of repeated offers, et cetera, et cetera. The next slide is exceptions and key questions, which really just illustrates that we don't know very much. So there are a limited number of exceptions that we know about, so limited term contracts. So in other words, if at the end of the review period, the work that you have available is only for a limited term. There will be an exception. You don't need to offer somebody a permanent contract when there isn't going to be enough work. But TBC, what that means, I'll come back to that. You will be able to terminate, so you won't need to make an offer if you've terminated for, let's say, fair reason, disciplinary, et cetera. 

⁓ And then the regulations may make other exceptions. When we get the consultation paper, we'll look to... sort of engage with all of you about what we would want those other exceptions to be. I think we should all proactively be working on putting into the government in response to the consultation where else we think there needs to be exceptions. But I mean, these are all the things we don't know. What is a low hours contract? In other words, what is the threshold going to be? What's the length of the reference period? Probably 12 weeks. That's what is the indication from the government.

How are you going to calculate guaranteed hours across that period? I talked a little bit about agency workers. How long do you have to make an offer? How long do they have to respond to an offer? Will we have further exceptions? And then compensation. So we know compensation will be just and equitable, but it will be subject to a cap. the whole idea of compensation has been totally thrown up in the air. You heard us talk about unfair dismissal compensation being uncapped. So what does that mean in this context? I've put on the slide here, you're gonna get these so you're not expected to look at it, but just the pathway. 
 
So there's a reference period. If they've worked more than the minimum contracted hours, you have to offer a guaranteed hours offer. There'd be a response period. They either accept it, in which case, if the permanent contract then is above the low hours regime, that's it. They're taken out of it. But it's perfectly possible that their guaranteed hours... is still below the low hours threshold. You go right the way back this cycle and you have to keep doing it. If an exception applies, then you don't need to make the offer. ⁓ And then if the worker works the same or less than the hours in their contract, you don't need to make the offer, but then the whole cycle begins again. So just sort of trying to create a sort of visual presentation of how it will work, ⁓ complicated.

I'm just going to say something very quickly about short shift notice and compensation and I'm just give you some very high level tips and then take any questions very conscious of time. mean this administratively is still a nightmare but conceptually I think easier to understand. Same group of people that we're talking about also we know includes agency workers. You're going to have to give reasonable notice of a shift. We don't know what that is. ⁓ The responsibility with an agency will be shared.

There'll be compensation for short notice shifts. Again, we don't know what the compensation regime is going to be, but we know that the regulations will specify the amount of time. In other words, if you've got given less than the regulated period of time, there'll be compensation.

Collective agreements again can exclude these provisions, again, whether unions will be willing to concede, probably unlikely that you'd get a complete exclusion. So it may just be a narrowing of some of the rules when we see them. It's possible that the government exclude high paid workers. That's one of the things a lot of people have said in response. That you may... have high paid people on shifts that you need to be available last minute and actually are these rules really intended for that group of people should they be excluded? And likely to be some excluded shifts for certain types of urgent work, but again, we don't know what those are going to be. So conceptually, I think much easier to understand. Administratively though, still a complete nightmare. In terms of things, I think you... can be doing because we always want these things to be practical and we're racking our brains because actually if I go back there's so much we don't know. But the one, the three things I'd say, definitely is worth doing the work if you are a business that have peaks and troughs of work. So if you know there are times of the year where you're much less likely to have work available, having evidence of that will be really important because that's how you'll put yourself into that limited time offer. So, somebody, for example, does their 12 week review period across a peak period, let's say Christmas trading, if you're a retailer, ⁓ the 12 week review period comes up 25th of December, but you know that the peak trading period ends at the end of January. You would want to be giving yourself the best chance to demonstrate that you can make a limited time offer that covers peak period. We don't know how that will work, but gathering evidence now is going to be helpful.

I think there is value in engaging if you've got very, very big populations of low hours workers, zero hours workers, it's worth engaging with them to understand the level of interest in this because is it just an administrative thing? In other words, you'll make the offer, nobody's really interested in it, nobody wants guaranteed hours. I think that may be quite helpful from a resource planning perspective, but it's only going to be worth doing if you have huge numbers of these people. If you have no zero hours contracts, hard to do anything because we just don't know where the threshold is. But I do think it's worth taking a guess at thresholds. So looking at your workforce and saying, look, if the low hours threshold was 10 hours a week, what percentage of our workforce was above that? If it was 12 hours a week, 15 hours a week, but just having some broad assessment so you have a feeling when the rules come in what percentage of your workforce falls within, falls to be caught by this.

In relation to agency workers, my view again, I you'd need to be a big organisation for this to be worthwhile. But if you're pushing a lot of work through agencies, if your agencies provide you with a lot of people, one of the things I think you can start to engage with them about is that you don't want to be provided with anybody that falls in the low hours contract regime. In other words, the only people that should be provided to you are ones whose contracted hours take them outside this regime.

You're going to have to quite significant buying power to do that, but some people push a lot of resource through agencies and I think there is a potential negotiating power there. In other words, saying to the agency, you can provide or find work for these people. We need to know that these people are going to be totally outside this regime, that we're not into this constant cycle of providing offers. Shift changes.

I think it is really worth auditing now on average, what is your shift notice and can you incrementally make changes to that to make it longer? In other words, to the extent you're able to, you try to push out the period of time you're giving on shifts. In other words, if you can make incremental but small changes, so when the changes come in, you're not forced overnight to be saying, actually, crumbs, suddenly we're having to give much more notice of shifts. If you can... incrementally adjust shift planning so you're just building in more time that is definitely going to help you. And then there's a shift systems issue like what is the capability of the shift infrastructure that you've currently got? Can this kind of process be built into that? How do you deal with multiple offers? So if you send a lot of offers out to lots of different people, how do those work currently? Because that's one of the things when the consultation comes back we'll get more information about.

So understanding how your shift system is working is going to help you. Actually, I think almost the most important thing is going to help you respond to the consultation because really what you need to do is have a handle on what you're currently doing so when there's an opportunity to influence how this works in practice, you're able to respond to the government on that this is what we're currently doing, this is where the challenges lie. A lot of that I know is super high level because if we go back there's lots of stuff we don't know, but we've probably got a minute or two for questions if anybody wants to ask anything, but promising that we 100 % will meet again to talk about this probably multiple times before it comes into effect.
 
That was one of the live session recorded at The Work Agenda 2026. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we did delivering it on the day.
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