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A placement-level review of how QTS engages, pays and is charged for contingent labour — the compliance exposure it carries today, and the commercial prize in moving to a single managed service.
This discovery covers roughly 10% of QTS's c.£29m annual contingent-labour spend, drawn only from the eight suppliers that returned data. The other £30m sits with sixteen suppliers who have not replied. The patterns below come from the visible tenth. Aggregated across the full book, the exposure and the prize both scale.
Net annual saving identified on the reviewed 10% alone, conservative case, worker pay held flat. Scaled across the full c.£29m book the indicative prize is £2.5m+ a year, alongside the removal of JSL, SDC and IR35 exposure.
Everything in this pack is built from suppliers who returned data, shown in green. They account for £2.9m of spend. The sixteen in white have not replied and hold £30m between them, including the two largest accounts in the entire book. The biggest spend is the least visible.
Annual spend by supplier (source: QTS group spend extract). Green suppliers form the basis of this discovery; white suppliers are unquantified.
The current base is fragmented across suppliers and geographies, and a third of priced data is missing entirely — Ganymede returned no charge rates at all, so QTS cannot see what it pays for eight live placements.
Nearly six in ten workers are paid through a third-party intermediary that QTS does not contract with directly. Each model carries a different tax, employment-status and liability profile — and from April 2026 the riskiest ones now reach back to QTS.
Topline Management Ltd, Sterling Solutions Ltd, Sterling Rail, Workwell Solutions Ltd and Paystream process pay for 24 of 41 workers — plus one personal service company, DR Quantum Ltd. None hold a verified, current accreditation in the data returned. Under the new rules, an unaccredited umbrella in the chain is QTS's problem, not just the agency's.
Markup is the gap between what QTS is charged and what the worker receives — it has to cover employment on-costs and supplier margin. Today it swings from 14% to 77% with no consistency, and the highest markups sit on the highest-risk models.
PAYE Direct carries the highest markup (76.9%) and the most direct liability — QTS pays the most for the model that exposes it the most.
Markup % on worker pay where both charge and pay rates were returned (31 of 41 placements).
| Trade | Agency | Pay £/hr | Charge £/hr | Markup |
|---|
A Crane Controller costs QTS a 71% markup through one agency and 53% through another — for the same competency, in the same period.
Filter the live placement book by region, agency and engagement model. Pay rates for identical trades differ by agency and geography with no rate-card discipline behind them.
| Ref | Trade | Site / Project | Region | Model | Agency | Pay | Charge | Markup |
|---|
From 6 April 2026, responsibility for PAYE/NIC on umbrella-supplied workers — and joint & several liability for failures — moves up the chain to the agency and ultimately the end client. QTS's current model concentrates that exposure rather than insulating from it.
16 workers (39%) are engaged on a supplier's own PAYE with no accredited intermediary in the chain. With QTS sitting at the top of a short supply chain, any PAYE/NIC failure by the supplier becomes QTS's joint & several liability under the April 2026 regime — and this cohort already carries the highest average markup at 76.9%. Highest cost, highest direct exposure, least oversight. Four of these placements (all Ganymede) returned no charge rate and no holiday-pay treatment at all.
Chapter 11 ITEPA 2003 / Finance Act 2025–26 makes the agency and end client jointly liable for PAYE and NIC that an umbrella fails to operate correctly. Five umbrellas appear in the chain with no verified accreditation in the return.
Machine Controllers, Points Operatives, an ALO Coordinator and a Site Warden are engaged CIS through one agency (Rail Safe Group / Topline). Roles under Supervision, Direction or Control cannot sit as genuinely self-employed — the SDC test almost certainly fails for directed track-safety work, exposing QTS to reclassification, back-tax and penalties.
An OLE CRE, a REL Planner and two senior roles are engaged through personal service companies. Off-payroll rules require QTS to issue a Status Determination Statement for each, with reasonable care and a dispute route. None is evident in the data.
Four different holiday-pay treatments are in use and 14 placements record none. Rolled-up holiday pay is only lawful for irregular-hours and part-year workers and must be itemised — a genuine WTR and AWR exposure where applied to regular workers.
Ganymede returned zero charge rates. QTS cannot reconcile what it pays to what workers receive across a quarter of the book, so cannot evidence value, margin or compliance to its own clients.
Neither incumbent tender should be accepted at face value — one prices key roles below sustainable cost, the other carries a premium. A managed model harmonises both to a defensible standard. See the rate review below.
QTS holds proposed rates from Danny Sullivan & Sons (DSG, 2026–27) and Spectrum Rail (2025–26). Across fourteen matched disciplines, DSG charges on average 22% more than Spectrum on midweek days — but Spectrum's headline looks cheap because several rates fall at or below what those workers are currently paid.
Midweek day charge rate £/hr across matched disciplines · DSG vs Spectrum.
Buying the cheapest card imports a compliance problem; buying the safest card imports a premium. A neutral-vendor MSP sets one transparent rate build-up — pay, evidenced on-costs, a harmonised margin and a fixed 1.5% fee — and holds every supplier to it. QTS gets Spectrum-like cost discipline with DSG-grade compliance, and the saving is independently auditable.
This models the annual saving from compressing today's excess markup to a transparent target by engagement type, net of Nutral's 1.5% fee. Move the assumptions — the maths recalculates live on the 31 priced placements (a conservative base; the unpriced Ganymede book adds more).
The scale-up is indicative, not a committed figure. It assumes the markup spread, model mix and compliance gaps in the reviewed 10% are broadly representative of the wider book. Confirming that is exactly why the full supplier data return is the ask.
Consolidate all contingent labour into a Nutral neutral-vendor managed service at a 1.5% fee, and onboard the existing supply base into a single compliant world with harmonised margins and continuous assurance.
Nutral becomes the single contracting and management layer across every agency. QTS keeps its suppliers and workers; it gains one rate framework, one set of terms, one audit trail and one point of accountability — for a transparent 1.5% fee on managed spend.
Single PO & invoiceNeutral, not a supplierReplace the 14–77% markup spread with one defensible structure per model: worker pay, evidenced statutory on-costs, a harmonised supplier margin and the MSP fee — visible on every line. The excess and inconsistency become the saving.
Pay protectedAuditable marginRun a structured programme to migrate Vital, DJ Civil, Rail Safe, Ganymede and Twoplustwo onto Nutral terms, accredited umbrella-only, sequenced so live works are never disrupted. Suppliers that meet the standard stay; the standard does not move.
Phased migrationNo site disruptionEvery PSC engagement requires a Status Determination Statement generated and held in RequiDex before approval. Every CIS request is SDC-tested at requisition; directed safety-critical roles default to PAYE. The platform refuses to raise a non-compliant engagement.
IR35 SDS ledgerSDC gateWorkforce Assured accredits and re-audits every payroll intermediary; RequiDex monitors pay-to-charge, holiday treatment, working time and accreditation status on every placement, every week — turning the April 2026 JSL exposure into evidenced control.
Workforce Assured auditLive monitoringThe controls above are not policies in a drawer — they are gates in the platform that processes every requisition, placement and payment.
A PSC engagement cannot be approved until a Status Determination Statement is generated, reasoned and logged against the role. Re-assessment triggers automatically on any change of duties, and the full ledger is available to QTS and HMRC on demand.
Each requisition is tested for Supervision, Direction or Control. Directed, safety-critical roles are blocked from CIS and routed to compliant PAYE — closing the false self-employment exposure that nine current placements carry today.
Only Workforce Assured accredited intermediaries can be paid. RequiDex reconciles pay to charge on every payment, so QTS can evidence correct PAYE/NIC operation up its chain and discharge its joint & several liability with data, not trust.