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UK Employment Agencies Regulations Cause Confusion
by Allan McGowan

In the UK the new Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 came into force on April 6 this year. As a result all music agents and any individual or company acting as such in the UK should, and legally must, institute new working practices. Although this is UK legislation it has much wider implications, as it requires that all music agents provide their terms of business, in writing, to every artist, promoter and/or venue they deal with in whatever country.

The new regulations are intended to "make provision to secure the proper conduct of employment agencies and employment businesses and to protect the interests of persons using their services." This may very well be the case in many areas of work, and certainly in cases such as the tragic exploitation of Chinese labour in the cockle gathering business in the UK, and similar cases, it is a vital and laudable initiative. However when rigorously applied to our own industry these regulations lead to an enormous amount of time-consuming paperwork at least, and at worst, to near prohibitive working practices and heavy penalties if the letter of the law is applied and not adhered to, in fact non-compliance with the Regulations is a criminal offence.

These Terms of Business require specific information to be supplied by any company receiving them in order to continue or to commence doing business with the issuing Company.

This has resulted in Agencies who have been regularly trading with promoters for 20 years or more, requiring regular partners to prove their bona fides, an uncomfortable and embarrassing situation All Companies are of course free to present terms in their own format as long as they are adequate in providing the information required by the regulations, but many may choose to use a document prepared by the Agents Association. Various Agencies have already issued these requirements with warnings that non-compliance will lead to cessation of business. There was a deadline and all this was required to be completed and returned by every promoter that deals with an agent by 5 July 2004. . However many of the smaller agencies and individuals have still to take action, and seem to be hoping that if they keep their heads down a lack of stringent enforcement may allow them to continue trading as before.

Certainly, particularly for the smaller traders, it seems to be that they are a ‘special case’ and that they are being grouped with other types of businesses that operate in entirely different ways on different levels.

The Agents Association have worked hard on trying to present a special case for Entertainment Agencies and have won certain concessions. Peter McLeod from McLeod Holden, Barry Dickins (ITB), Bob James (Arts World), Paul Fenn (Asgard) and Jan Sikorski (The Agency) have put in a lot of work on this, and music business lawyer Ben Challis has written a guide to the new regulations, contributed to by Fenn.
However this is still a problem and it is obvious that many businesses of all sizes are still confused and in many cases still unaware of their obligations, and the consequences of non-compliance. As we understand it the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) are recruiting extra staff to enforce the regulations. Many overseas promoters will also be confused by it all, and some may decide not to accept the demands, all of which harms the business.

The ILMC are sounding out their members on their experience of the new regulations so far, and their opinions on how to deal with the situation, in an attempt to help clarify the situation. It may be that compliance is the only answer and we will all just have to get used to it, or perhaps there is still some room for manoeuvre We would encourage Vip readers who may be affected by this to contribute to this information gathering which will hopefully inform and clarify, and may hopefully provide material to present to the authorities in order to lobby for amendments.