Umbrella Company, Umbrella Companies, AWR

Overview

The Agency Worker Regulations (AWR) has been one of the most significant pieces of legislation to affect the temporary worker market in recent years. The headline components of the regulations are:

Day 1 Rights: all agency temporary workers are entitled to access to the same benefits as directly employed staff in areas such as: - crèche facilities; canteen facilities; access to permanent vacancy information; parking etc.

12 Week Rights: after 12 weeks in the same assignments agency temporary staff are entitled to parity with directly employed staff in comparable, equivalent roles in the areas of: - Basic pay; Holiday Entitlement; personal bonuses.

Working with the Regulations – the Maddison approach

The complexities of the legislation mean that there is no one size fits all solution. Maddison Group therefore adopts a consultative partnership driven approach to supporting our Clients and Contractors in dealing with the legislation.

As one of our clients, the right approach to take with the legislation will be determined by a range of factors:

  • Are there directly employed workers in comparable roles?

  • If there are, are there parity issues in relation to basic pay, holiday entitlement and personal bonuses?

  • How is your end user client seeking to approach the legislation – are they open to pay uplifts to address parity?; have they considered what the directly comparable roles are defined as?; do they have specific directives on Swedish derogation or self employed workers?

  • What is the hiring pattern and duration of the assignments?

Dependent on factors such as these, we will offer advice and solutions that we believe are appropriate for you and your workers.

AWR Audit

Our approach with new and existing clients is to carry out an AWR audit to make sure we both understand all of the above issues. The audit will cover workers in existing assignments as well as new workers going forwards, considering all of the issues above.

AWR Action Plan

Our action plan will incorporate what we think are the right solutions for:

  • Your existing assignment workers

  • Workers going into new assignments

  • Specific clients who have particular AWR issues

AWR Compliant Solutions

Matching Pay Compliance – from 12 weeks, where there are no pay parity or holiday entitlement parity issues, Maddison Group will ensure AWR compliance through validating the comparator information.

Pay Between Assignments Solution

Maddison Group has a robust over-arching contract providing a Swedish Derogation solution.
The contractual components of the contract provide ‘reasonable’ terms and conditions to the workers in relation to pay between assignments.

Robust contractual framework .

Guidance on implementation and management of the contract in areas such as:

  • On-boarding

  • Termination

  • Disciplinary procedure management

Pay Between Assignments Solution

Where workers meet HRMC criteria for self-employed status, we have Self-employed solutions – Maddison Solo and Maddison CIS – which take workers out of scope of the AWR regulations.