ROGUE employment agencies are denying agency staff basic new rights and avoiding other employment rights by refusing employment responsibility for agency workers, according to a TUC report published today.

Temporary workers, permanent rights, is released to coincide with the launch of a TUC campaign aimed at raising awareness among agency workers, now believed to be approaching 500,000, of their workplace rights.

The report, based on the findings of Citizens Advice Bureaux and trade unions, reveals that agency workers are often denied basic employment rights because neither the hiring company nor the agency will accept them as employees. They also tend to miss out on their entitlement to three weeks' paid annual leave because agencies are cutting basic hourly pay and then adding notional holiday pay thereby merely restoring the hourly rate to its original level.

Other practices operating against agency staff include being restricted to 12-week contracts to avoid the Working TIme Directive regulations on holiday pay, being put under illegal pressure to ''opt out'' of the directive altogether, and having to pay agencies to look for work without any guarantee of any being found.

Anticipated new Government regulations are expected to ensure than where hiring companies refuse to accept responsibility for agency staff then the agency will be deemed to be the employer. They should also include preventing agencies from charging clients to look for work and speeding up the prosecution of agencies that break the law.

The TUC would also like the Government to insist on a licensing system for agencies that would be obliged to register every three years and tighten up regulations so that agency workers are not denied their three weeks' annual entitlement to paid leave.