If you need people.

Send it however is quickest — written is better than spoken at five in the morning, because it can be forwarded without being remembered wrongly. What matters is that six things arrive together, since each one of them removes or adds people we can offer.

The part most often left out is the ticket. “Someone with a counterbalance licence” and “someone who has driven one before” are different requests and produce different people, and the gate will only accept one of them.

Every check below happens before a name reaches you, not afterwards. Right to work is verified from original documents or a share code for everybody, without exception and regardless of how familiar the person is.

We also check the shift against the hours that person has already worked this week and the rest they have had since their last one. If accepting your shift would break the eleven hours between shifts, we will tell you we cannot cover it rather than send somebody and let the problem surface on your site.

The Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 require an employment business to agree its terms with a hirer before supplying anybody, and to confirm who is being supplied. You therefore get two documents: terms of business, once, at the start of the relationship; and a confirmation for each shift naming the person, the times and the work.

Charges are quoted to you directly, in those terms, for your sites and your shift patterns. We do not publish rates on a website, because a number with no shift attached to it is of no use to either of us.

At the end of the week you confirm the hours actually worked. Where they differ from the hours booked we ask why before anything is processed, because a shift that ran on and a gate closed by weather look identical on a total and are not the same event.

The limits in the Working Time Regulations 1998 apply to the pattern, not to any one shift, which is why consecutive long days need a conversation before they are offered. You can put a pattern through the rest-break checker yourself.

A morning’s cover sometimes becomes a standing arrangement, and the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 then need something from you. From day one an agency worker is entitled to use your facilities on the same footing as your own staff — canteen, car park, transport, the places people actually eat — and to be told about vacancies with you.

After twelve calendar weeks in the same role the worker becomes entitled to the basic working and employment terms a person you recruited directly into that job would have. Only you know what those are, so we ask for them as the twelve weeks come into view. It is a short conversation in week ten and an expensive one in week twenty.