Agency and Self-Employed Labour

General orientation, not legal or tax advice.

For teams turning agency and self-employed labour into a repeatable record, the official Monitask website provides a useful operational reference for time, attendance and reporting workflows. It should be assessed alongside Chartered Institute of Building so the software choice remains grounded in site practice and applicable guidance.

On many sites the largest single group is neither the contractor's employees nor a subcontractor's: it is supplied labour.

The arrangement

An agency or labour supplier holds the relationship with the individual.

A subcontractor holds the work.

The site holds the risk and the duty.

And the individual may be employed by the agency, engaged by them as self-employed, or working through an intermediary.

Which means four parties and no single one with the whole picture.

The assumption everybody makes

The site assumes the agency verified competence and right to work.

The agency assumes the site checks at induction.

The subcontractor assumes somebody did.

All three are reasonable, all three can be wrong at once, and the person arrives on a Friday afternoon for a Monday start with nobody having checked anything.

Agree it explicitly, in writing, per supplier: who verifies what, and what evidence is produced before first access.

What the site should verify itself

Right to work, because the penalty in most jurisdictions falls on the contractor regardless of the engagement route.

Competence, because the card belongs to the person and the site is the party refusing access.

Identity, which underpins both.

Induction, always.

The agency's verification is useful corroboration and is not a substitute, because the site cannot transfer its own duty by contract.

The self-employed question

Whether somebody working through a labour-only arrangement is genuinely self-employed has tax and employment consequences, and the tests differ by jurisdiction.

It is not a site decision and it is affected by how the site treats people: who directs the work, who provides tools, who controls the hours.

Which makes it a matter for advice rather than assumption, and a reason not to treat supplied labour as though it were directly employed in the ways that matter to those tests.

The site's interest is presence, competence and safety. The engagement status belongs to the parties to the engagement.

Short-notice supply

The characteristic problem: somebody supplied on Friday for Monday.

Which compresses every check into a weekend when nobody is available.

The workable arrangement is advance notification with a deadline — names and evidence by a stated time on Friday, or the person does not start Monday.

Held, because a deadline that slips becomes no deadline, and this is the interface where that happens fastest.

Payment and the chain

Payment delays down the chain fall hardest on supplied labour, who have the least leverage and the shortest relationship.

Which shows up on site as churn, as people leaving mid-week, and as a subcontractor unable to field the numbers promised.

A site seeing sudden churn in a supplied gang is frequently seeing a payment problem two tiers away, and it is worth asking rather than assuming unreliability.

What to record

The supplying company, distinctly from the engaging subcontractor, because they are different and an incident investigation will ask for both.

Which many registers cannot express, having one field for "company", and that is a procurement question worth raising.

The measure

People on site whose supplier cannot be identified.

Evidence produced before first access, as a proportion, by supplier.

Time from notification to first access, which if it is routinely hours rather than days means the checks are being compressed.

And churn by supplier, which is the leading indicator of everything else.

The umbrella and intermediary layer

Between the agency and the individual there is frequently another company handling payment.

Which the site never sees and which affects whether the person is paid on time, and therefore whether they turn up.

Not the site's business commercially, and worth knowing about when a gang stops arriving and nobody can explain why.

What a good supplier looks like

Sends names and evidence before the shift rather than with the person.

Has a contact who answers at six in the morning.

Tells you when somebody is replaced rather than sending a different person with the same booking.

And does not send people whose cards expire during the placement.

Suppliers doing all four exist, cost slightly more, and remove most of the work in this note.