A senior BT executive has expressed concerns that the telecommunications giant has not moved fast enough ahead of the Agency Workers Regulations (AWR) implementation on 1 October.

Tom Keeney, employee relations & resourcing director, BT Group, told the recent Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) AWR National Summit in London: “It worries me whether we have the understanding and awareness of the significance of the regulations.

“I feel it’s a little bit rushed…I think we could have got there sooner,” added Keeney.

Keeney revealed that one of BT’s suppliers has been trialling the Swedish Derogation, where workers are directly employed by an agency and paid between assignments. However, Keeney said he was keen to continue to get value from the temporary agency workers model.

“We want to avoid adding to the cost burden of the current model so that we don’t have to use other models,” he added. “What I don’t want is challenges and issues about the way the legislation is applied that would be a disincentive to using the current model.”

The HR director of Allied Milling and Baking, Nigel Toon, told the Summit that carrying on as now was not an option. The company currently uses between 200 and 700 temps at any one time, and continuing to use them in the same way would cost the company an additional £2m a year, said Toon.

However, he warned of the reputational risk of using agency workers for less the 12-week qualifying period under AWR.

While never using agency workers for more than 12 weeks, and ensuring there was a six-week break between assignments would mean that no temporary workers would qualify for equal treatment “the reputational risk” to the company” in the community” was too great.

“It’s something that I would feel uncomfortable about doing. It’s really important that we are seen as a good place to work. The reality is that people have a choice of where they work,” said Toon.

He said that such an approach also risked the company losing important skills. There were also grey areas about what exactly constituted a six-week break between assignments, he added.

Toon said Allied was likely to adopt an “agency consolidator approach” where one company was the intermediary between a number of agencies and Allied. “It is highly unlikely that one agency will be able to deliver what we want,” he said.