Improving temps’ conditions ‘has a price’

27 February 2008

Local authority employers have warned that moves to improve temporary agency workers’ conditions might exacerbate the shortage of transport planning skills.

The Government is under pressure from Labour MPs and unions to honour a commitment to give agency workers the same basic working and employment conditions as if they had been recruited directly.

Prime minister, Gordon Brown, is to establish a commission to examine how temps could be given pay and conditions comparable with permanent workers. Labour backbenchers rebelled last week over a private members Bill to give equal treatment to temps, which would see them given the same rights to holiday and sick pay and pensions – making it more expensive for councils to use them.

After the Agency Workers Bill secured its second reading, Brown said he was committed to ‘finding a practical solution’ to providing temps with ‘a fair deal’. A number of environmental services departments rely on using temporary workers, both in response to short-term increases in demand, and also where – in 26% of councils attempting to hire a traffic/transportation engineer in 2005 – permanent posts cannot be filled.

Cllr Stephen Greenhalgh, leader of Hammersmith & Fulham LBC, said his authority ‘uses agency staff in response to market forces’. There was ‘a growing preference in the sector for interim, flexible assignments rather than permanent jobs,’ he claimed. In 2004/ 05, 17 London boroughs responding to Surveyor spent £9.5M in total on temporary workers.

Given this, London Technical Advisors Group chair, Joe Weiss, warned the Government against introducing ‘nonsensical aspirations that would mean we get less work done for the money’.

However, if the cost of using agency workers was to rise, this could give added impetus to some councils’ efforts to reduce the number of temps filling permanent posts. Many agency workers have long-term placements. One-third for more than a year. Haringey council, for example, was trying to recruit more permanent staff, said a spokesman, to ‘provide greater workforce stability.

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Improving temps’ conditions ‘has a price’

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