Hard‐to‐Reach Insider Actors on Light‐Touch Labour Market Regulation in the UK: Compliance, Deterrence, and Intelligence?

Actors who deliver state policy on low wage precarious workers on the front‐line manage coercion and exploitation in the workplace by accepting the presence of both through permissiveness rather than seeking enforcement of labour market regulations. To develop this argument the article examines permissiveness in compliance, deterrence, and intelligence approaches used by regulators and enforcement agencies. The article provides a contribution to understanding the limitations of current approaches to labour market regulation which oversee noncompliance, confine deterrence activities to specific sectors, and use intelligence sources for law enforcement rather than labour market enforcement. The contribution does so by examining enforcement agency actors, and regulatory actors as hard‐to‐engage actors who play a critical part in the formulation labour market regulation policy on the front‐line.