1.4 million workers are employed using zero hours contracts, the ONS reports

Close to 1.4 million UK workers are not guaranteed a specific number of working hours as their employers use zero hours style contracts, recent figures supplied by the ONS (Office for National Statistics) have revealed.

This comes as a significant increase compared to the last year's ONS estimates of non-guaranteed hours contracts (NGHCs), which suggested there were only 583,000 in use, a news source points out.

The report suggests that one in 10 employers — who responded to the ONS snapshot survey conducted over two weeks earlier this year — reported using NGHCs, which include so-called zero hours agreements. This group of employers included almost half of all businesses in the tourism, catering and food sectors, while more than one in five employers in health and social work also reported using them.

Larger employers were much more likely to use zero hours agreements than smaller organisations, and nearly half of businesses with 250 or more employees make some use of these contracts compared with 12 per cent of businesses with fewer than 20 employees.

In addition, the latest ONS survey revealed evidence of a further 1.3 million contracts where no work was undertaken, which might include people with contracts with several employers, agency staff, those not wanting to work, those who have found another job elsewhere but remain on employer records, some people on leave or sick and those not offered work in the reference period.

Monitoring the employees' working hours, especially when they're hired on "zero hours" contracts, can prove to be difficult at times, but Tensor plc's comprehensive WinTA Enterprise.NET suite will make everything a lot easier, while also enabling companies to actually save money, by making their HR departments a lot more efficient.

WinTA Enterprise.NET is a complete smart card time and attendance system including European Working Time Directive checking and reporting, providing total control over working rules, Access Control, Job Costing and System Security.

Our advanced time and attendance solution can hold details for up to 2000 employees, including a photograph of each person, and allows the operators to easily search for the details of a particular employee, including their annualized hours. Furthermore, the WinTA Enterprise.NET will store information on up to 1000 production or department jobs, with employees booking time against these jobs via their smart cards or key fobs.

Additional very important features worth mentioning include the payroll and absence summary functions, shift swapping support, shift premiums, secondary pay bands support and auto clockout, meaning that employees will be automatically clocked out at a specific time.

If you want to find out more about Tensor's WinTA Enterprise.NET suite, our dedicated team is ready to answer all of your questions.