The Recruitment and Employment Confederation is pushing back on the UK government’s guaranteed hours proposals under the Employment Rights Act, warning the plans as drafted are unworkable for the temporary and agency workforce its members supply. Guaranteed hours rights are due to take effect in 2027, giving workers with regular working patterns a contract reflecting the hours they actually worked over a reference period, currently expected to run around 12 weeks, along with rights to reasonable notice of shifts and payment when shifts are cancelled or cut short at short notice.
On its Employment Rights Act hub, REC states plainly that “the plans are complex, costly and unsuitable for agency work, risking jobs, growth and labour market flexibility,” and has submitted a formal response to the government’s consultation urging a more targeted approach, including exempting genuinely temporary assignments from the guaranteed hours obligation. The organization’s concern is that treating agency placements the same as permanent shift work could push some employers and workers toward false self-employment arrangements instead, and that employers facing new guaranteed hours liabilities will simply hire fewer temporary workers rather than commit to hours they cannot forecast.
The original insight for HR and workforce planning teams: this is not a debate confined to recruitment agencies. Any employer that relies on flexible or on-call staffing, in retail, hospitality, logistics, or healthcare, will inherit the same reference-period tracking and cancellation-pay obligations REC is describing, and the shift scheduling and time-tracking systems most companies run today are not built to calculate a rolling guaranteed-hours entitlement automatically. Vendors serving those systems have roughly a year to build that capability before it becomes a compliance requirement rather than a feature request.
Read more: UK Permanent Hiring Rises for First Time in 4 Years and Job Cuts Rose 58%, and So Did Hiring Plans.
