The public sector should implement long-term skills planning to combat a lack of specialist and professional skills within government that has lead to a “dependence on interim” staff, finds a report from the Public Accounts Committee.

The report, ‘Off-payroll arrangements in the public sector’, available online here, has also shown that the BBC employs 25,000 in off-payroll contracts. Around half of these are for ‘talent’, and the BBC told the committee that “the use of freelance workers is a key part of their business model”, and particularly because of “the nature of the broadcast industry, which often requires production staff to work for short periods on programmes while also being free to take employment for other production companies”.