Dr Jo Salter’s talk was an absolute highlight of our annual conference. Drawing on her remarkable career in the Royal Air Force, she held the whole room captivated from start to finish, weaving together personal stories, hard-won lessons, and genuine warmth in a way that felt both inspiring and refreshingly down to earth. Her reflections on courage, resilience, and breaking new ground resonated far beyond the cockpit, leaving our audience with insights they could carry straight back into their own lives and work. She struck the perfect balance between candour and humour, and the energy in the room during her session — and the buzz of conversation afterwards — was a testament to just how much her message landed. We were truly privileged to have her speak, and the overwhelmingly positive feedback speaks for itself.
Chris closed with a year-in-review of FCSA’s data and activity. Across reporting Members the accredited contractor workforce stood at 183,232 (down 2.5% year on year), with umbrella still the largest engagement type at 58% (106,843 contractors) and PEO the fastest-growing at +153%. He recapped FCSA’s policy work (14 consultation responses; meetings with HMT, HMRC and MPs), events, resources, the FCSA Academy, the Levy Network (over £4.5m raised, £2m invested, 305 apprenticeships funded) and the Diligence Hub.
Andy Chamberlain, chairing for FCSA, framed the session around a labour market at an unusual inflection point, arguing that the combination of uncertain economic conditions, regulatory change and political attention “frankly feels somewhat unprecedented” — a moment of genuine upheaval, but one the industry can come through stronger if the detail is got right. Over roughly half an hour he drew each panellist through the state of the market, the Employment Rights Act, worker status, compliance, and the year ahead.
Shazia Ejaz grounded the discussion in REC’s data (used by the Bank of England because it lags less than the ONS figures, which she said are “in a bit of a pickle”): employer confidence is still falling but more slowly, temporary hiring is at a three-year high, and permanent placements keep declining, albeit at a softer rate — a market tilting toward temp work with tentative signs of stabilisation. Her sharpest point was on guaranteed hours, where she argued that including agencies in the proposals is “just a bit mad,” because two-sided flexibility is already built into the agency model and most workers value it; her longer-term worry is that shrinking the temp market would choke off entry-level and youth access to work.
Ben Bruten, speaking from inside the Fair Work Agency, was candid about the tension between a government “shouting it wants growth” while introducing the largest package of labour-market red tape yet imagined. He urged attention to all of the Employment Rights Act but cherry-picked three priorities — zero-hours/guaranteed-hours contracts, the first-ever regulation of umbrella companies via a redefined “employment business,” and worker status “bouncing around Whitehall” — stressing that how each is drafted will be “determinative” of how the markets actually function. Looking ahead, he named politics as the dominant wildcard: a new Prime Minister and cabinet “throws everything up in the air,” and big decisions on how far to push reform (his “full-fat versus oat milk” metaphor on zero hours) will land within two or three months.
Rebecca Seeley Harris supplied the deepest structural critique. Compliance, she argued, has been treated as a by-product of the supply chain when it should come first, and the real problem in the flexible labour market “is the lack of transparency… it’s not the flexible labour market itself.” She traced the tangle between tax and employment rights — the emerging “hybrid” deduction model that can leave a worker with PAYE deducted but no rights — and called for a wholesale, digitally-supported review of the supply chain. She also flagged what she called “the mosquito in the room,” a coming wave of professional-looking but AI-generated worker claims that will strain the tribunal system, and floated a “rebuttable presumption” to shift the burden off individual workers.
Across the four, there was notable consensus that the pace of change is unprecedented, that transparency and compliance need to move up the agenda, that regulation risks unintended consequences (pushing the market back toward off-payroll models and straining the tribunals), and that the single biggest near-term uncertainty is political.
“Good employment practices should always outperform good AI prompts.”
Charlotte tackled the surge in AI-drafted grievances and Employment Tribunal claims (“Dear HR, As per section 123…”), walking through the challenges they create — volume and structure, reduced realism, over-optimistic AI advice, data risks and overly legalistic tone — and how employers should respond.
Her core message: an AI-generated grievance is still a grievance, so focus on the substance rather than the polish. She illustrated the risk of AI over-confidence with a case study where an employee used AI to argue pregnancy discrimination despite not being pregnant, and a constructive dismissal claim that failed because she was still employed.
“Focus on Facts not Style — an AI-generated grievance is still a grievance.”
“The rules moved responsibility and liability; they did not prohibit PSCs.”
Seb’s theme was moving “from 2021 fear to 2026 maturity,” debunking seven myths that still shape the market — e.g. that IR35 reform banned PSCs, that HMRC isn’t really policing this, that “inside IR35” means umbrella, that a Statement of Work is automatically safe, and that an SDS alone is enough — plus a supply-chain “blind spot” where liability can crystallise at fee-payer level.
He also used a worked “set-off/offset” example (100 workers, £11m gross fees) to show a gross liability of £5.115m falling to £2.035m after offset, arguing residual risk is quantifiable and manageable.
“Five years on, the market does not need to choose between blanket caution and false comfort. It can choose informed confidence.”
“The difference was knowing exactly where in the workflow AI belongs and where it doesn’t.”
Rob gave a grounded take on where AI actually delivers in payroll. Citing MIT’s 2025 study of 350 enterprise AI deployments (95% saw no return, 5% real return), he argued the differentiator is knowing exactly where AI belongs — using it to “read the mess” (unstructured emails, skewed timesheet scans, contractor pay queries) while keeping calculation, compliance and auditing with human experts.
He showed real automation stages and a 95% time-saving on manual timesheet input and invoice mapping, while warning of the cost of getting it wrong (a $440,000 Deloitte/Australian Government case of fake citations) and “the saved-time trap” of not reinvesting freed-up hours.
“What is reasonable notice? Less than 5 days up to 4 weeks!” with underpayment penalties potentially 50%, 100% or 200%.
Hannah walked through the government’s consultation (published 2 June 2026, closing 26 August) on three core proposals: guaranteed working hours, reasonable notice of shifts, and short-notice cancellation payments.
She unpacked the open questions — an hours threshold the government prefers to set between 8 and 20 hours a week, reference periods of 12–52 weeks, the fact that it’s the employer’s duty to offer guaranteed hours, and unresolved issues like TUPE, joint liability and where umbrellas sit.
Her call to action was emphatic.
“RESPOND! RESPOND! RESPOND!”
“Fairer for Workers, Better for Business.”
Keith presented the BHI (15,000+ employer members) and the UK’s first National Hiring Strategy, launched in Parliament in November 2025 with 29 recommendations to fix hiring that costs the UK £75bn a year.
He covered the nine standardised National Hiring Metrics, the Association of RecTech Providers (ARTP), digital wallets/credentials work with government departments, an incentivised standards ecosystem, a National Hiring Curriculum, and worker-voice platform JobsAware.
“We need a completely new hiring system to cut the 41% of new hires who leave in their first 12 weeks, to cut the 150m job applications to 3 million hires and to cut the £75 billion cost.”
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