Anyone work for a recruitment agency?

[ChroniC]

I was wondering about a practice in the recruitment sector.
Many self employed people now have to use an umbrella company to be paid if they are not limited when freelancing. This is fine but recruitment agencies are now getting in clients by lowering their cost to the employer by making the employee pay the Employers National Insurance Contributions from their day rate rather than from an uplifted sum of money to cover it.

Is this common practice amongst all recruiters to make themselves competitive or is it a dodgy practice that I should be concerned about, as it has happened to me!
This article explains it well. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2...sts-dodging-ni-cutting-rights-supply-teachers

Infact my situation is much worse than that article. The recruitment agency have given me a day rate and then from that made me pay the ENIC, business costs, and pension costs. This imo is totally wrong and over a week has cost me £70. I am happy to pay the umbrella company charges to use their services but I am sure that this is wrong.

 

[ChroniC]

Aye, the way I'm looking at it the UC are doing absolutely nothing for their fee, are they even doing PAYE for you?

Yes the UC do all the PAYE for £24 fee, however they are also doing the Employers part too, which should be covered by employer and given inside the lump sum to the recruiter as a + above the dayrate however to attract business the recruitment agency are taking that sum out of my day rate and claiming it's standard issue thus lowering their total costs to the employer. I'm interested to see if that's the case across all recruiters or whether it's a scam.

With regards to contracts, I don't think I've ever signed anything with the recruitment agency. It's all online. I am searching emails now to see if I did it online. (worked with them years ago for a day and didn't notice these costs as much)

If you're paying all your costs, you may as well just go limited company surely?

Yes, I am looking into this now after this fiasco.