What effect will the Agency Workers Directive (AWD) have on outsourcing?
The Agency Workers Directive will reduce the attractiveness of simply using temporary staff as a way of increasing flexibility, and therefore clients will have to look at a more sophisticated way of bringing in that level of flexibility, certainly outsourcing is one way of being able to provide that since the employees of the outsourcing provider can be on a fundamentally different contract and different conditions and different working practices from the clients whereas that's not possible with temporary workers under the Agency Workers Directive.