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A number of recruitment industry leaders have joined the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) to call for an amendment to the apprenticeship levy to ensure it doesn’t unfairly discriminate against temporary workers and contractors.
The levy will require employers to pay 0.5% of all their payroll expenses to fund the government’s commitment to deliver three million new apprenticeships. This new payroll tax is presently proposed to come into effect in April 2017.
However, the REC and its members – which include the CEOs of recruitment experts Randstad, Hays and Pertemps – argue that recruiters’ payroll includes the wages they pay to temporary agency workers who do not work in the recruitment industry and are, due to the average length of their assignments, unlikely to ever qualify for a quality apprenticeship. Less than 5% of all assignments last for 52 weeks or more.
REC Chief Executive Kevin Green said: “The current proposal is inherently unfair. We support apprenticeships and have created one for the recruitment industry. We’re simply asking George Osborne to be reasonable, and to only require recruiters to pay the levy on their own permanent, substantive staff who work in recruitment, not the millions of agency workers who don’t work in their businesses but are placed into assignments in all the other sectors of the UK economy.
“Over one-third of adults in Great Britain work as a contractor, freelancer or agency worker at some point in their careers. The government needs to recognise that it is a mainstream part of the labour market and work with us to build ways for people to work flexibly without sacrificing access to training and development. The first step would be not to impose this unfair levy on recruiters which will limit their ability to fund the training of temps and contractors. We and our members are keen to work with government to find solutions.”
The letter to the Chancellor is signed by:
- Kevin Green, CEO, Recruitment & Employment Confederation
- Mark Bull, CEO, Randstad UK
- Karen Colfer, VP & Managing Director UK & Ireland, Kelly Services
- Alistair Cox, CEO, Hays plc
- Steve Ingham, CEO, Page Group
- Greg Latham, Managing Director, Encore Personnel
- Therese Liddle, CEO, NRG plc
- Mark Manaton, CEO, Blue Arrow
- Mark Mitchell, CEO, Meridian Business Support
- Gary Pinchen, CEO, CIP Recruitment Services Ltd
- Paul Ross, CEO, Barker Ross Group
- Andrew Sweeney, CEO, The Best Connection Group
- Amanda Watson, Managing Director, Ambitions Personnel
- Tim Watts, Chairman, Pertemps Network Group
- Jennifer Wrightson, Managing Director, Just Recruitment
- John Marshall, CEO, Adecco UK & Ireland
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