A question for the freelancers/contrctors...

Can anyone tell me why agencies insist that you must either be registered as a limited company or work through an umbrella company?

I do my work in partnership with my business partner and have not had any problems until working through an agency, who insist that I must work under a limited company in order for them to pay me; this means either setting up my own limited company (costing money, increasing expenses and more legal liability) or working through an umbrella company (costing me a lot more money). My accountant says there is no reason for the agency to be like this and they are only being awkward to save them paper work. Does anyone have any advice?

advice? not really :) but put yourself in there shoe's? if this limitation saves you paperwork, wouldnt you do it too?

Agency's as a whole are out to make as much money possible with the littlest amount of work, you cant expect anything more from them than just that.

hmmm... Well I'm just going to refuse to form a limited company or pay money to work under an umbrella company. I've told them that they can pay me under PAYE if it suits them, and then I'll resolve any over payments with the tax man at the end of the tax year.

If they still insist on me setting up a limited company or paying to go under an umbrella company, I'll just tell them that they can hire me again in a year or two when it's become suitable for us to become a limited company. At the end of the day, I've not had any problems with any of my previous contracts, I'm eligable to work in the UK and have nothing to hide.

Hmm...Not heard of this before. Please tell me:

Which company?
What job/project?
How much you quoted?

And I will try to help you using freshly harnessed prawn brain-waves.

Advice: Tell them to get stuffed.

lol. Succinct as always, Gfk. ;)

I don't want to get into trouble by mentioning company names, but if you look on www.cwjobs.co.uk, you will see the agency name on a fair number of the jobs posted.


Nothing too hard, just writing web templates in XHTML and CSS.


An hourly rate working on behalf of the IT agency for one of their clients.


If push comes to shove, I will - but in a more polite way of course :-) . They seem to be good at making sure that everything is ok, plus are likely to provide more work in the future, so if I'm forced to set up a limited company, I'll just tell them that I'll get back to them when it becomes convenient for me to do so.

If your doing serious contract work its better to have a limited liability company anyway. Otherwise if you don't meet your obligations you may have the bailifs around taking your personal posessions and putting you in huge debt with bad credit. And a lot if trouble.

If your just doing small $100 here and there you can do as you please.

Only doing simple HTML template design at the moment. I also offer services for PHP development, but don't take on high risk projects and don't offer my services as lead developer, so the risks are fairly small.