The Guaranteed Hours Consultation Closes 25 August. Here’s What Recruitment Agencies Should Do Now.

The UK Government’s consultation on guaranteed hours for agency workers — part of the Employment Rights Act 2025 — closes on 25 August 2026, with implementation targeted for 2027. If the regulations are finalised without significant input from the recruitment industry, the consequences for temporary staffing businesses could be severe. Adrian Marlowe and Theresa Mimnagh from Lawspeed joined Nitin Sharma on RecTalk to be direct about the stakes — and equally direct about what agencies can still do before the window closes. The situation is serious. It is not yet settled. And the difference between those two things depends entirely on whether the recruitment industry shows up and speaks clearly.

This post is for information only and does not constitute legal advice. Speak to a specialist in recruitment law for guidance relevant to your business.

Why the Consultation Window Matters

The Employment Rights Act 2025 is already law. The guaranteed hours requirement for agency workers is already on the books, scheduled for implementation in 2027. What isn’t yet fixed are the regulations that will determine exactly how the rules work in practice — the definition of “low hours,” the length of the reference period, which workers and sectors might be excluded, and critically, how the anti-avoidance provisions will operate.

The consultation that closes on 25 August is the Government’s invitation to the industry to influence those regulatory details. This isn’t performative. Government consultations with substantive, evidence-based responses from organised industry voices do shape the final regulations. The AWR implementation process demonstrated this. The challenge is that shaping outcomes requires participation — and participation requires the industry to move before the deadline, not after.

As Adrian Marlowe explains, the consultation was launched under a deliberately understated name (“Ending one-sided flexibility: reforms of zero hours and similar contracts”) that makes it easy for agencies not running zero-hours arrangements to assume it doesn’t apply to them. It applies to all of them. Every agency supplying any kind of temporary worker is in scope. Every hirer using any kind of agency worker is in scope. The first task is simply to make sure people know that.

Three Things Recruitment Agencies Should Do Before 25 August

Adrian’s framework for agency action is clear and practical:

1. Respond to the Consultation With Evidence

Individual agency responses matter — but they’re most powerful when they contain specific, quantified evidence of commercial impact. What percentage of your assignments run for 12 weeks or longer? What would happen to your transfer fee income if hirers were required to offer direct contracts at that point? How many of your current client relationships rely on the flexibility that the anti-avoidance provisions would effectively constrain?

Trade associations such as the Association of Recruitment Consultancies (ARC) — of which Adrian Marlowe is Chair — need this data from member businesses to build a credible, evidenced case to the Government. A response that says “this will hurt us” is less useful than a response that says “this will affect X% of our assignments, eliminate Y% of our transfer fee income, and likely result in Z clients reducing their use of temporary workers.” Numbers make arguments. Build the numbers from your own data.

2. Get Your Clients Involved

The impact of this legislation falls on hirers as well as agencies. A hirer who uses agency workers because they want flexible capacity — and who faces the prospect of tribunal claims whenever they end an assignment early — has a direct interest in the consultation outcome. They may not know the consultation exists. Your job is to tell them.

Informing clients about the guaranteed hours proposals and helping them understand the commercial implications for their own businesses does two things: it positions you as a genuinely knowledgeable partner rather than just a supplier, and it generates additional evidence for the consultation response. A hirer’s account of how the anti-avoidance provisions would affect their hiring decisions is powerful input for the Government to receive alongside agency responses. Coordinating that evidence gathering is legitimate and valuable.

3. Capture the Impact on Real People

One of the most important — and underused — arguments against poorly designed employment legislation is the impact it has on the very people it’s supposed to protect. Legislation designed to help vulnerable workers can also eliminate the flexible working opportunities that some workers genuinely prefer and depend on.

Recruiters are in a unique position to capture this. School leavers getting their first work experience through temp roles. Parents returning to work who need genuine flexibility. People with health conditions who can’t commit to set hours but can take shifts when they’re well. If the guaranteed hours rules reduce the volume of temp opportunities in the market — which is a realistic consequence of making temp assignments more legally risky for hirers — some of those people lose options they currently have. That impact is worth documenting and including in responses to the consultation.

What to Watch in the Regulatory Detail

There are specific questions within the consultation that recruitment agencies should prioritise in their responses:

• The length of the reference period. The Government currently prefers 12 weeks but is consulting on alternatives. A longer reference period reduces the proportion of assignments affected and gives the industry more room to operate. Make the case for a longer period with evidence from your assignment length data.
• The definition of “low hours.” The consultation includes proposals to define what constitutes a low-hours arrangement that falls within scope. A narrow definition could exclude many agency arrangements. A broad definition captures almost everything. Push for specificity and evidence-based thresholds.
• Sector exclusions. The Government is considering whether genuinely seasonal or genuinely temporary work should be excluded. The definitions matter enormously for industries like hospitality, agriculture, events, and construction that rely on agency supply for seasonal peaks. If your clients operate in these sectors, their evidence is particularly relevant.
• The anti-avoidance provisions. This is the provision that Lawspeed identifies as potentially the most damaging — the one that could make any assignment termination legally exposed. Push back hard, with specific examples of legitimate reasons why assignments end before 12 weeks that have nothing to do with avoiding the guaranteed hours obligation.

Getting Specialist Support

Responding to a Government consultation on employment law is not something most agency owners should attempt without specialist advice. The regulatory language is technical, the stakes are high, and a poorly framed response is less useful than no response at all. Lawspeed is running a dedicated seminar specifically on this consultation — covering the guaranteed hours obligation, the 12-week reference period, the anti-avoidance proposals, and the practical steps agencies can take before 25 August. Details at lawspeed.com.

Real Talk

The consultation window is the opportunity to influence how this legislation actually lands. Once it closes, the regulations will be written on the basis of what the Government heard — and if the recruitment industry is underrepresented in those responses, it will be underrepresented in the outcome. There’s still time. Use it.

This post is inspired by the RecTalk episode with Adrian Marlowe and Theresa Mimnagh from Lawspeed: The Biggest Threat to Recruitment Since AWR? Watch the full conversation on YouTube. For specialist recruitment law advice, visit Lawspeed.

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