This report by Lindsay Judge and Daniel Tomlinson of the Resolution Foundation aims to shed new light on agency workers by mapping out the scale and nature of this overlooked group in the UK today.
Analysis of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows that there are an estimated 865,000 agency workers in the UK today. As a result, agency workers are as significant a group (at least in numerical terms) as those working on zero-hours contracts. Moreover, agency working has grown over time, with the number rising by over 200,000 just since 2011 - that's the equivalent of a 30 per cent increase over the period.
If the rate of change observed over the last five years were to be sustained, the Resolution Foundation estimated that there would be more than a million agency workers in the UK by the end of the decade - even after accounting for an expected overall slowdown in employment growth in the coming years.