The impact of flexible hiring

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To raise family living standards in the UK, the number of ‘quality’ part-time and flexible jobs needs to be increased. This study quantified the impact such an increase might have. It also analysed supply versus demand, and suggested that businesses are currently under-utilising a proportion of the skilled candidate market.

Key points

• Parents, older people and disabled people (the three groups under study) need to earn at least £10.63 an hour to meet minimum income standards. This rate establishes the pay threshold for a ‘quality’ job and equates to a full-time equivalent salary of £19,500 a year.
• 1.9 million people could benefit from getting a quality flexible job and hold the necessary qualification levels to attain one. Of these, over 1.5 million people are currently in part-time work below the pay rate for a quality job. A further 154,000 people are workless.
• There are 202,300 well-qualified people in the groups who are living in poverty.
• Only 6.2 per cent of quality job vacancies are advertised with options to work flexibly. This compares poorly with the high demand for flexible work (47 per cent of the workforce want to work flexibly).
• There are 8.1 people in poverty for each quality flexible vacancy, of whom 7.4 people are workless. For quality full-time jobs, the demand is only 0.9 workless people per vacancy.
• An eight-fold increase in the number of flexible job vacancies would be needed, for supply versus demand to match that for quality full-time jobs.

Published January 2016

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