Guaranteed-hours rights should not be applied to agency workers, and FCSA has joined temporary-labour leaders in saying so. The government’s consultation on the Agency Work Regulatory Framework, part of the “Make Work Pay” programme, closed on 25 August 2026, and asked whether reforms under the Employment Rights Act 2025 should extend guaranteed hours to those working through agencies. On 8 September 2026, leading figures across the sector set out a united case against it.
The core objection is simple. Flexibility is the reason most people choose agency work in the first place. Impose fixed guaranteed hours on a model built for movement, and you remove the feature workers actually want.
What Are Guaranteed-Hours Rights Under the Employment Rights Act 2025?
Guaranteed hours require an employer to offer a worker a contract reflecting the hours they regularly work over a reference period, rather than leaving them on zero-hours or low-hours arrangements indefinitely. The measure targets one-sided flexibility, where a business keeps a worker available but commits to nothing.
For a directly engaged worker on a zero-hours contract, the logic holds. The problem arises when the same rule is mapped onto a tripartite agency relationship, where the agency, the hirer and the worker each hold a different part of the arrangement.
Why the Agency Model Does Not Fit
Agency work is not a workaround for a permanent job. For many contractors and temporary workers it is a deliberate choice:
- The ability to take assignments when they want and decline them when they do not.
- Movement between hirers, sectors and locations without being tied to one employer.
- Short-term and project work that would not exist as a guaranteed-hours role at all.
Force a guaranteed-hours obligation into that structure and you create a question nobody can answer cleanly: whose hours are being guaranteed, over which assignments, by which party in the chain? The agency does not control the hirer’s demand, and the hirer does not employ the worker.
What Did the Sector Actually Say?
The 8 September intervention was not a blanket rejection of worker protection. It was a specific warning that applying guaranteed hours to agency workers would damage the flexibility those workers rely on, and would do so without improving their security in any real sense.
The likely outcome, the sector argued, is fewer assignments offered, more caution from hirers, and a contraction in exactly the short-term and seasonal work that agency workers depend on. A rule designed to help could leave people with less work, not more.
FCSA’s position sits with that argument. Worker protection is the point of the standard FCSA sets. But protection delivered through the wrong mechanism, imposed on a model it was never designed for, protects nobody.
How Does This Sit Alongside the Rest of the 2026 Reforms?
This is one strand among several live changes reshaping temporary labour. The Fair Work Agency launched on 6 April 2026, consolidating enforcement of the National Minimum Wage, holiday pay and statutory sick pay into a single body, with umbrella companies now in scope as employment businesses under the Employment Rights Act 2025. PAYE joint and several liability for umbrella chains took effect on 6 April 2026, and formal umbrella regulation is expected in April 2027.
Against that backdrop, the guaranteed-hours question matters because it tests a principle. Reforms aimed at the directly employed cannot simply be copied across to agency arrangements without working through the consequences for a three-party relationship.
With the consultation now closed, the focus turns to the government’s response and the secondary legislation that follows. Those running the model every day remain best placed to explain where it breaks, and FCSA will continue to press that case as the detail is drafted.
What Should Agencies and Umbrella Companies Do Now?
Two practical steps while the sector awaits the government’s response:
- Review how your contracts describe flexibility and assignment choice, so the reality of the arrangement is documented and defensible.
- Prepare for April 2027 umbrella regulation in parallel, rather than treating each reform as a separate project.
The case FCSA and the sector have made is not against reform. It is against reform applied without regard for how agency work functions.
Flexibility is not a loophole. For the people who choose agency work, it is the whole point. Policy that treats it as a problem to be fixed risks removing the one thing that makes the model work.
For guidance on compliant temporary-labour supply and the standards that protect workers across the chain, see the FCSA Accreditation standards and check providers on the FCSA Members register.
Sources
- FCSA, “Temporary Labour Leaders Unite Against Guaranteed-Hours Rules for Agency Workers” (8 September 2026): https://www.fcsa.org.uk/temporary-labour-leaders-unite-against-guaranteed-hours-rules-for-agency-workers/
- FCSA, “Fair Work Agency: What the April 2026 Launch Means”: https://www.fcsa.org.uk/fair-work-agency-what-the-april-2026-launch-means/
- FCSA, “Umbrella Company Regulation: Chris Bryce on Next Steps”: https://www.fcsa.org.uk/umbrella-company-regulation-chris-bryce-on-next-steps/
