As reported in their local paper recently, the Council has made 150 agency staff direct employees in response to AWR, a move it believes has saved the council £70,000 every year.

The majority of the Council’s agency workers are in refuge collection, street cleaning and ground maintenance and all at the lower end of the pay scale. There are some Council employees in higher paid positions in areas such as social care and legal services and the Council has reported that it still has 134 agency workers currently on assignment.

As well as a way of ensuring AWR compliance, the Council has also claimed that the move was part of a cost cutting exercise in order to trim the £8 million a year bill it currently has for employing agency workers.

Our challenge is has the Council actually made these savings or simply shifted the cost? Its agency bill may have fallen as a result of the move but by making the workers permanent employees the Council will undoubtedly incur additional costs elsewhere, National Insurance Contributions being just one example.

The Council has also lost the flexible element of its workforce which could have led to further savings. We all know the public sector is currently facing a huge campaign to reduce costs, year on year, as the Government looks to address the UK’s budget deficit. Any additional cuts to its funding may mean that the Council can no longer afford to employ these workers and redundancies may be required, which comes at a cost.

In the short term the Council has been able to offer permanent roles to some agency workers and has picked up some positive press coverage as a result, so far so good. However, a pessimistic view you could take is that they are simply solving one problem by storing up another for the future. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

One alternative the Council could have taken would have been to audit its entire supply chain for agency workers and identify where robust, compliant service providers, such as Parasol Group, could have stepped in to mitigate the risks associated with AWR.

What do you think? Has the Council done the right thing? Leave a comment below and gives us your view.

That doesn’t mean that the industry needs to switch off, we believe that there will be a tribunal at some point in the not too distant future, but there has been a couple of exchanges in the House of Commons last week that would suggest that the Government is looking to wash its hands of all things AWR.

First of all we had Mark Lancaster, the Conservative MP from Milton Keynes North, who asked the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills what assessment has been made of the effect the Agency Workers Regulation has had on the unemployment figures for 2011.

Norman Lamb, the Lib Dem Minister for Employment Relations, Consumer and Postal Affairs replied that no assessment has been made of the impact the impact AWR has had on the unemployment figures for 2011. However, he did say that the Government would monitor the impact of AWR on the job market.

In a follow up question, Mr Lancaster then asked what assessment had been made of the effect of AWR on small, independent recruitment agencies. Something we looked at in last week’s blog after reports in the FT.

Norman Lamb replied that no assessment has been made by the Government on the effect of AWR on small, independent recruitment agencies. However they will work with representatives from trade associations to monitor the impact of the regulations on the market.

We also know that the Government has committed to a paper review of AWR in November 2012 which we discussed last December, however all this does is smack of trying to brush it all under the carpet. Perhaps the UK Government has realised there isn’t much they can do with this EU led legislation and are picking their battles. There have been some well publicised skirmishes with Europe over Greek financial bailouts and the European Court of Human Rights for example and perhaps AWR is small fry compared to these and not worth going into bat for or against?

What do you think? Leave a comment below and tell us your view.

A couple of weeks ago I (Steven Proud) posted a blog under the title ‘Can we stick to the facts please?’

The point I was trying to make in the blog was that a number of commentators within our industry were using AWR as an opportunity to make sweeping comments which aren’t substantiated but were based on hearsay and conjecture. Vested interests come in to play here too. We are a leading umbrella company so of course we have a vested interest in all things AWR and we’ve always been completely transparent about this. I’m happy to report that since 1^st October it’s been largely business as usual here and at our sister company, ClearSky Accounting, so the two years hard work in the run up seem to have paid off.

In the blog I used an unattributed quote taken from a discussion we took part in in The Guardian in September. I wrote:

“Umbrella companies will find things sticky.”

Jon Norris, from Crunch Accounting and Freelance Advisor, the author of the quote has been in touch with me as that is not what he said. Jon said: “It’s worth noting the Agency Workers Regulations coming into force next month will probably make things for Umbrella Company users a little shaky for a while.”

Please copy and paste the following link into your browser if you would like to read more about the quote so you can see its context http://bit.ly/qHSinZ.

So Jon is right, I misquoted him and apologies to Jon for that. I have now invited Jon to write a post for this blog himself should he wish to do so and we’d be delighted to hear Crunch Accountings point of view.

As one of the UK’s leading employment services and umbrella companies, Parasol has been completely open about AWR and how we are tackling it. It’s central to what we do and had the potential (although it’s been largely business as usual so far) to have a huge impact on our industry. Yes we have a vested interest but as a leader we also have a responsibility to the staffing industry and the workers who choose to work via an umbrella model.

We were always confident that we could help our staffing industry partners work within AWR, largely because we have always done most of what the new legislation calls for anyway. We didn’t have seismic changes to make to develop a robust Swedish Derogation model that minimised the cost and hassle for all those in the supply chain and our Match Perm Pay Model goes way beyond anything else on the market in terms of compliance.

Where we have faced objections to our models we have sought to address these in an open way, using facts, legal opinion and the legislation itself to demonstrate why we think we are right. As I said earlier, we are the industry leader so this is how we are supposed to act.

What has been frustrating for me has been the lack of substance from the anti-umbrella brigade. Making sweeping generalisations that help nobody.

A couple of weeks ago we took part in a Guardian Live Chat for freelancers and temporary workers and an ‘industry expert’ made the comment that “umbrella companies will find things sticky.”

Fair enough, why do you think that?

“Well it’s just something I’ve heard.”

Here is another one taken from a Contractor UK discussion.

“I wouldn’t want to be somebody working via an umbrella scheme trying to get a contract extension after the 12 weeks are up.”

I asked why and I never got a response. I also invited the author to post an article on this site but the author didn’t have the time and didn’t feel they knew enough about AWR anyway. It was just something they had heard. So why make comments like the one above? Why pass it off as expert advice? If it’s just conjecture then say so and let’s discuss it.

A continued frank and open debate into all things AWR will only help the industry as a whole continue to get to grips with AWR but sweeping generalisations, rumour spreading and simply making things up to suit your own agenda helps no one.

Can we stick to the AWR facts please.

Steven Proud

PR Manager, Parasol