Advice re late payment from agency

[ruffneck23]

Hi All,

Just wanted a bit of advice please, I've been contracting through an agency, in my contract it states I should be paid on the last working day of each month, this has only happened once in 9 months.

Today is my last day working as my contract was suddenly pulled last week with one weeks notice. I contacted the lady at the agency ( it's her company and a one person company ) asking what time I should expect to be paid today.

The message I got back was

'We haven't been paid yet so it won't be today. It is looking like it will be next week, hopefully Tuesday with any luck.'

but it wont be next week as the company I'm working for only runs payroll every 2 weeks and it has been run this week, so I'm looking at another 2 weeks again to get my final pay.

Is it worth me going to a solicitor and getting a letter sent to the agency? I have said to the agency lady that I need to get paid as I dont want to be chasing her after I have left employment.

What can I do? Is it worth me going to a local solicitors this afternoon and getting a letter / email sent to her and charging her for my legal fees?

Thanks for any advice, I'm not usually shitty about these things but I'm never given a straight answer from the agency and I'm always getting mucked about by her

 

[BigTom]

Unfortunately I don't think you have much in the way of legal recourse here.

If you are invoicing then late payment legislation might apply but it only kicks in after 30 days of non-payment: Late commercial payments: charging interest and debt recovery - so two weeks late wouldn't give you any space for surcharges for late payment.

If you are working PAYE then ACAS would be your port of call for resolving disputes.

I don't think getting a solicitor involved at this point would be worthwhile and of course it'll cost you which might not be worth doing either. I don't think you'll have any scope for adding legal fees onto your charges at this point, payment would need to be later than it's probably going to be.

It's not your problem they haven't been paid, she needs to be chasing the company for the payment they should have made already and sort out her cashflow problems to pay you on time, but in any practical sense I think you are going to have problems in adding any extra charges to your invoice or invoicing them for extra charges if you are being paid PAYE.
If it got to the point of going to court, that's when legal costs could be added on I think, and if it's under £10k that's small claims which is meant to be simple enough to not need solicitors.

 

[ruffneck23]

Thanks BigTom

 

[existentialist]

FWIW, I think BigTom is right. One of the things that enables contractors to (in principle) charge premium rates over employed staff is that they/we operate outside of the normal employment protections.

In theory, assuming you could prove a contract exists between you to pay you on the last day of the month, then you could argue that they are in breach of contract, but it would be expensive, destroy any goodwill that may exist between you and the agency, and almost certainly take far, far longer to pursue than the actual delay in payment.

When I was an IT freelancer, I tended to operate on the basis that the buggers will always pay late, you'll have huge voids between contracts, and all kinds of other worst-case assumptions. Then, if there weren't voids and people coughed up on time, it felt like a bonus.

Oh, and either stop using that agency, or add 15% onto your rate for the next job for inconvenience.

 

[ruffneck23]

Ok , so panic over, after messaging the Agency lady yesterday, saying I didnt want to have to contact my solicitor, she called me last night and said she had managed to 'find a way' to pay me

And Ive just been paid, thanks for all the advice.

 

[equationgirl]

Ok , so panic over, after messaging the Agency lady yesterday, saying I didint want to have to contact my solicitor, she called me last night and said she had managed to 'find a way' to pay me

And Ive just been paid, thanks for all the advice.

Glad you have been paid at last. I bet the agency has a buffer fund to cover these situations, I guess they would have rather paid out after Easter.

They shouldn't promise to pay people within a certain timeframe if they're not prepared to honour it.

 

[wemakeyousoundb]

Ok , so panic over, after messaging the Agency lady yesterday, saying I didint want to have to contact my solicitor, she called me last night and said she had managed to 'find a way' to pay me

And Ive just been paid, thanks for all the advice.

and that's the trick:
"I will be speaking to my solicitor"
'usually' gets a positive response

as an aside (bearing in mind IANAL):
your contract is with the agency (your employer) and so they should stick to that contract, the company that hadn't paid them is their client not yours and neither your employer
(obviously the contract you have with the agency is what governs your avenues of complaints here)

e2a: glad you got paid