Agency and Temporary Workers: 5 Duties You Cannot Pass to the Agency
Your claims team takes on eight temps for a backlog. The agency sends a compliance pack, somebody in procurement files it, and the eight people arrive on a Monday and sit down at desks nobody assessed.
The assumption underneath that is reasonable and wrong. The agency is their employer, so the agency owes the duties. In fact the law splits this deliberately, places several duties on you as the hirer, and in one case requires you to inform the worker directly rather than through the agency at all.
This is a different question from the two it gets confused with. A contractor's employee works in your building for their employer, and our note on contractors in your office covers that split. Your own employee at a client site is a third case, covered in our note on secondments and client site working. The agency temp is the awkward middle: not your employee, not a contractor's employee doing a contractor's work, but a person doing your work, under your direction, in your workplace.
Here are five duties that stay with you, and the one question the law does not answer cleanly.
1. Telling the worker what the job needs, directly
The provision most hirers have never read, and the only one that names temporary workers in its title.
Regulation 15 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 deals with temporary workers, and it does two separate things. It requires the employer or self-employed person to give the worker supplied by an employment business comprehensible information on any special occupational qualifications or skills needed to carry out the work safely, and on any health surveillance required. Separately, it requires that the employment business itself receives comprehensible information on those qualifications and skills and on the specific features of the job that may affect health and safety, and the employment business must then ensure that information reaches the worker it supplies.
Read that twice, because the common practice fails it. Sending a job description to the agency and leaving the agency to brief the worker satisfies one limb and not the other. The duty to inform the worker sits on you.
The regulation does not set a deadline for informing the agency worker, which is a gap worth noting rather than exploiting. For a fixed-term employee the equivalent information must come before they start work, and the practical duties below bite from the moment the person arrives, so the only defensible timing is day one.
2. Instruction and information on your risks
The general duty, and the one an inspector reaches for first.
Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires an employer to conduct its undertaking so that persons not in its employment are not exposed to risks to their health or safety. An agency temp at a desk on your floor is squarely a person not in your employment.
Regulation 12 then makes it specific. An employer must ensure that people working in its undertaking who are not its employees receive appropriate instructions and comprehensible information on risks arising from the conduct of that undertaking. It also requires the outside employer to be given comprehensible information on those risks and on the measures taken to comply.
So the information flows in both directions and to both parties, which is why "the agency inducted them" is not an answer. Your risks are yours to explain, and a group induction that covers only permanent joiners leaves the temps outside it.
3. Evacuation, specifically
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The duty people are most surprised by, and the one with the clearest failure mode.
Regulation 12(4) requires the employer to ensure the outside employer receives sufficient information to identify the person nominated under regulation 8(1)(b) to implement evacuation procedures, and to take all reasonable steps to ensure that the outside employees themselves receive sufficient information to identify that person.
In plain terms, a temp who could not name or recognise the person responsible for getting them out of the building is a regulation 12(4) problem, not an oversight. It is also the duty most likely to matter, because evacuation is the one event where a three-week placement is in exactly the same danger as a twenty-year employee and has none of the accumulated knowledge. Where anyone in the group needs assistance to evacuate, our note on personal emergency evacuation plans covers what the arrangement has to cover.
4. The workstation, the equipment and the premises
The practical cluster, and the one that creates the most work.
The workplace duties attach to the premises and the work rather than to the contract of employment. The equipment you provide, the layout you decide, the lighting, the welfare facilities and the condition of the floor are all yours, and they do not change character because the person using them is paid by somebody else.
Display screen equipment is the clearest case. Where a temp does screen work habitually and as a significant part of their work, the practical duty to provide a suitable workstation sits with whoever controls the premises and the work. Whether the agency or the hirer pays for the assessment is a contractual question worth settling, and it is not a reason for a twelve-week placement to sit unassessed at a desk set up for somebody of a different height.
The honest test is whether a temp joining on Monday gets the same workstation conversation a permanent joiner gets. Usually not, because the process is attached to onboarding and temps bypass onboarding.
5. First aid, and counting them in
The quiet one, and an easy fix.
First aid provision is determined by a needs assessment, and the population it assesses is the people present rather than the people on the payroll. An organisation that has eight temps in the building has eight more people who may need first aid, and whose presence affects both the number of first aiders needed and the cover required at the times they work.
The same logic applies to anything else sized by headcount. If the figure came from the HR system, it is wrong by the number of agency workers on site.
The five, and who holds the record
| Duty | Who owes it | What it looks like done properly |
|---|---|---|
| Qualifications, skills and health surveillance information | You, to the worker, and separately to the agency | A written job hazard brief given to both, not a job description sent to the agency |
| Instruction and information on your risks | You, to the worker and to the agency | Temps included in the same induction as permanent joiners |
| Evacuation arrangements | You, with reasonable steps so the worker can identify the nominated person | A floor walk and a named person on day one |
| Workstation, equipment, premises | You, as the party controlling both | The same setup conversation a permanent joiner gets |
| First aid and headcount-based provision | You, counting them in | A needs assessment that counts people present |
None of these transfer by contract. A clause allocating responsibility to the agency may well settle who pays for what between the two of you, and it does not move a statutory duty that the law places on the party controlling the work.
The question the law does not answer cleanly
Which brings us to reporting, where honest advice is more useful than confident advice.
Regulation 3 of RIDDOR 2013 defines the responsible person by category. For an employee it is that employee's employer. For a person who is not at work or who is self-employed, it is whoever was in control of the premises where the incident happened, by means of carrying on an undertaking. The regulation says nothing specifically about agency workers.
So the answer turns on the worker's employment status, which the hirer frequently does not know and cannot determine from the placement paperwork. Where the temp is an employee of the agency, the agency is the responsible person and holds none of the facts. Where the arrangement makes them something other than an employee, the control-of-premises limb points back at you.
The practical consequence is that an injury to an agency worker is the single most likely incident in a professional firm to go unreported by anybody, because each party assumes the other filed it. Two things fix that cheaply. Settle it explicitly in the agreement with the agency, naming who reports and who supplies the facts. And record every incident involving an agency worker in your own register regardless, so that whoever reports has something to report from. Our note on RIDDOR reportable injuries covers the categories and the deadlines, and the HSE's pages on gig economy, agency and temporary workers sit alongside its wider vulnerable workers material.
Holding a register that spans a population who join and leave every few weeks, with assessments and inductions attached per person, is a narrow but real case for health and safety consultants and software working as one thing rather than two. Periodic health and safety audits should test it by asking for the induction record of the most recent agency worker, which in our experience is the fastest way to find out whether a process exists.
Where the duty sits abroad, and why it is clearer
Groups assume this is a British ambiguity. In several countries it is the opposite: the duty is allocated more explicitly than here, and allocated to the hirer.
Germany is the sharpest example. Section 11(6) of the Arbeitnehmerüberlassungsgesetz provides that the hired-in worker's activity at the hirer is subject to the public-law occupational safety rules applying to the hirer's establishment, and that the employer duties arising from them fall on the hirer, without prejudice to the supplier's duties. It then goes further than UK law on timing. The hirer must inform the worker before the start of the employment, and again on any change in their work area, about hazards they may face and the measures to avert them, and additionally about any need for special qualifications or skills, or special medical surveillance, and about increased particular hazards of the workplace.
Compare that with regulation 15, which requires much the same content and sets no deadline for delivering it to the agency worker. The German provision answers the timing question the UK leaves open, and places the duty on the hirer in terms. France works similarly in substance, treating the user undertaking as responsible for working conditions during the assignment, with restrictions on assigning temporary workers to certain hazardous work.
The practical lesson for a multi-country group is counterintuitive. Your UK entity, operating under the more flexible regime, is the one most likely to have no record of having informed anybody, because nothing forced the timing. The pattern that works is to adopt the stricter requirement as the group standard, which costs a day-one briefing and satisfies every regime at once.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite has spent 15+ years in organisations that flex headcount through agencies and discover at audit that the flexible population sits outside every process built for permanent staff. We support 1,500+ businesses in 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with insurance, legal, education and office-based clients, and the fix is usually a one-page hazard brief plus a day-one checklist rather than anything structural. Where induction is the gap, health and safety training is the cheaper half of the answer.
For multi-country groups, our global health and safety consultants apply the local allocation of duty rather than assuming the British split, and our international health and safety consultants can tell you which entities place temporary workers under a regime stricter than the one they are following.
Ask for the induction record of the last agency worker who joined. Then book a free gap analysis and we will tell you in one call how much of your workforce sits outside your arrangements.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
