Out of curiosity, I decided to put my current income, which although through an agency is a regular PAYE contract, through two separate umbrella scheme online calculators. In both instances I would pick up £40 less in my wage packet every week… 
Whilst I can appreciate the benefits to the agencies, what benefit is there to the individual driver? More precisely if you are going to typically be £££’s down every week, why on earth would anyone want to work through these schemes■■? What is wrong with drivers telling agencies they are only prepared to work through a regular PAYE scheme and walk away from dodgy deals that appear to only benefit others?
LIBERTY_GUY:
Out of curiosity, I decided to put my current income, which although through an agency is a regular PAYE contract, through two separate umbrella scheme online calculators. In both instances I would pick up £40 less in my wage packet every week…
Whilst I can appreciate the benefits to the agencies, what benefit is there to the individual driver? More precisely if you are going to typically be £££’s down every week, why on earth would anyone want to work through these schemes■■? What is wrong with drivers telling agencies they are only prepared to work through a regular PAYE scheme and walk away from dodgy deals that appear to only benefit others?
I for my sins used to own a driving agency and we never used Umbrella, always PAYE, this left us completely out of the market when pricing our drivers to potential customers which unfortunately led me to lose the business. I visited one client who spent around £10k per week with 1 agency whose drivers and mates where all paid through Umbrella, one of the drivers pulled me to one side to ask about his payslip thinking I was from his agency, we worked out that his actual rate of pay worked out below minimum wage for the hours he was doing.
I then spoke with the Transport Manager who didn’t seemed interested “I just fill in the timesheet every week” so approached the companies head office to say that where you aware the agency use are maybe paying less than minimum wage? They were not interested either.
From memory Unberalla schemes can work out beneficial for the drivers if he/she are on a decent hourly rate £10+, has nights out, lots of overtime or starts from different depots, otherwise I think it mostly benefits the agency.
The biggest con with umbrella isn’t so much the fees paid, but what you then don’t get for it.
You’re promised a cheaper tax bill - but how can that be promised when your current taxation might already be below what they can get it to with the fee paid?
I often get cold calls offering me “cheaper this” and “can undercut your current provider” that… All bull, as I point out what price I want to pay for that to be true - what they’ve just said to me. At this point, they usually hang up on me. I love it. 
Secondly, umbrella is used to palm-off PAYE lower rates of pay for a job that otherwise would be paid gross, self-employed rates, with VAT added where appropriate. I’ve often said £18ph gross is what a contractor should be invoicing to equal £10ph PAYE takehome on agency.
Why elect to have all the downside of being self-employed, pay some suits to do your payroll, and end up with the pay that us ordinary grunts get at the end of it?
Now… To the far extreme… If someone offered me £25ph monday-friday days - but I had to pay a £50pw umbrella fee, then I’d jump at the chance - because I’d then be getting what I paid for providing a shift has a minimum number of paid hours, and the work is plentiful. Eg. contracted 35+ hours per week. Thus, in this example above, I’d effectively be paying a £50 commission to get paid £875 a week for a 35-hour-week job. I’d be pretty confident that even with the fee taken off, I’m still coining it in over everyone else around… 
You’d already have to have had some experience of the job in question to know this of course… No guaranteed hours=no good with the above deal, but I’d hope that’s obvious to everyone. Luckily, I’ve yet to come across umbrella fees charged to a zero wage slip. I shouldn’t be putting ideas into peoples heads though eh? 
I often read the odd post about umbrella companies and their evil ways, however, as an agency driver (Looking for full time employment to get out of the petty crap I’m always asked to do!) i only pay £9.50 per week for mine. I also get to claim back traveling expense, meals out, plus overnight stays etc. No idea whether this is an unusually honest umbrella company or there something deeper! But my pay ranges from £300-£400 depending on hours etc with the tax, NI, etc sorted out for me. Never had a problem so far in the 1 year i’ve been with them.
Be very, very careful about working for an umbrella company.
HMRC are clamping down on them, and you may get landed with a tax bill.
Keep receipts for EVERYTHING you claim, including fuel and odo readings for your car for the travel to work.
I don’t pay for what amounts to free umbrella at the agency I work at, but I have been booted off claiming meal allowances though. This is apparently because I couldn’t supply back receipts for all meals claimed. Personally, I think the meal allowance should be like the PPM allowance - just added to one’s tax code. It’s unreasonable I think to “not pay an allowance” because you can’t prove you’ve actually eaten and drank each and every day FFS. 
Receipts be damned. It should be our automatic right as workers on shifts longer than 10 hours each and every day or night to get a built-in meal allowance, seeing as it’s a HMRC credit rather than actual cash handed out by payroll after all… How does one “prove” one has done a night out if quizzed I wonder?
That said, I don’t think there’s any danger of HMRC clamping down when it’s already overly strict as it is with my payroll firm.
Mileage claims are worked out from autoroute, so there won’t ever be any quibble there either.
HMRC have clearly stated that from this month they will be cracking down on many of these schemes, as many are operating illegally, they are also cracking down on those labour only contractors that claim ‘self employed’ status.
Some time ago I was offered a travel and subsistence scheme via an agency, that stated I could claim up to £150 week for food, as I was working nights?? Needless to say I declined the contract.
There will be lots of people over the next few months getting an unexpected demand from HMRC, if they are as vigorous with this as they have been with other campaigns in the past. 
Much of it comes down to employment status, as from my understanding by doing my own online research, working via an umbrella scheme means you are still classed as a PAYE employee, working for the umbrella company??
In the days of paper tachos your tacho card showed where each shift ended, and was a legal record of your day’s work.
More difficult with a digi
So the owner of the trucks pay an agency, who take a cut, then an umbrella company take another cut and finally the driver gets his piece of the action…
How many people are employed in the agencies and umbrella companies? Probably tens of thousands and all of them are leeching money out of driver’s pockets and preventing drivers from getting a full time job
So true, Mercman…and probably the main reason for the driver shortage.
Why would anyone want to spend £000s acquiring a qualification to join an industry where you have to fiddle and work through middlemen just to make a living.
Funny that the bus industry doesn’t have this problem…but you can go along to a bus company, do an aptitude test, and if you pass it they train you and give you a job.
Spot the difference!
GasGas:
So true, Mercman…and probably the main reason for the driver shortage.
Why would anyone want to spend £000s acquiring a qualification to join an industry where you have to fiddle and work through middlemen just to make a living.
Funny that the bus industry doesn’t have this problem…but you can go along to a bus company, do an aptitude test, and if you pass it they train you and give you a job.
Spot the difference!
The whole agency thing harks back to the days when dock workers all used to hang out by the dock gates in the hope of getting picked for a day’s work by the ship owners (or whoever it was) agency drivers are just the modern equivalent, zero job security, giving up probably a quarter of what they could earn to a parasitic middle man who is not content with leeching money from them, they now want the drivers to take care of most of the back office stuff as well, either by the umbrella scheme or by going Ltd, funny how their commission isn’t dropping to reflect that
Agencies are without question the worst thing to happen to the industry from a driver’s perspective 
A poem about agencies…
“They could not work
They dared not rob
And so they lied to please the mob!”
To be fair, they had a role once in supplying drivers for seasonal tasks or when regular drivers were off work, but now some big companies seem to be nothing but agency (then wonder about driver quality, difficulty recruiting etc).
Somewhere along the line the roles of the recruitment agency (interviewing, screening and supplying suitable full-time staff for employment) and staffing agencies (supplying temps) seems to have been merged.
They were useful at one time, I’ve done a bit of agency work myself when I wanted a bit of time to do things and yet still earn a few quid here and there.
They were also useful for semi retired people or as a stop gap when looking for a decent job, but now they’ve become a monster and their appetite for taking a bigger and bigger share of the money is increasing 
They are a load of scum to a man (with the odd exception) they serve a purpose to a point as the previous post suggests, how many people work for them for years on end very sad indeed, men treated worse than dogs.
The agency I used to get conned by used an umbrella company they charged £25 a week.used to take home on average £450 only payed umbrella fee and £45 ish NI and no tax, when I got a permanent job and went PAYE got £700 tax rebate 
I looked at this and viewed it with suspicion. Mate of mine was using one through his CIS building work and when he showed me is payslip I was more than sceptical…
So went LTD, cut the middle man out and have a nice accountant who points me in the right direction…
I was PAYE on agency, using multiple agencies was a pain with tax codes so went Umbrella with 2 main agencies, couple of weeks in and ive gone LTD Co, the fees went up the more i earned! So hopefully going LTD will work out better, i like the variety with agency work and rates arent too shabby, got a long term contract to a local pallet firm ( they pay £7.21ph to full time drivers!! , agency offered me £7.50ph - told them i wouldnt get out of bed for less than £9- stood my ground and now get a good rate plus overtime , doing about 55 hrs a week.
Claim my mileage and food back every day usually about 22 miles,£10 food -( leave home before 6am and out over 10 hrs)so about £20 a day extra in my pocket
Did my first run to Hamburg at weekend for agency - got £15ph flat rate for a 7.5t!! £50 night out( no sleeper) dropped truck and they flew me back, got picked up in chauffer merc to take me back to collect my car from yard after! ( was a one off for now)
Stand your ground with agencies, demand more as a GOOD driver, there is work out there if you look, they might get a european driver to do it for less but will soon call you back when they smash the truck up! 
Some outfits are so small that if you smash the truck up, everyone is out of work because it was the only one.
demonbiker:
Claim my mileage and food back every day usually about 22 miles,£10 food -( leave home before 6am and out over 10 hrs)so about £20 a day extra in my pocket
Oh My!
It surprises me how many numpty driver ■■■■■■■■■ think like this?
You are NOT claiming your expenses back from HMRC.
You are claiming TAX RELIEF on those expenses.
For someone on basic rate tax that is 20%
You are only receiving £4 in your pocket.
20% of the amount claimed.
