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Nearly one million workers in the UK are on zero-hour contracts. A further five million are nominally self-employed. In modern Britain, flexibility is often presented as a way of reconciling pressures between work and family life.

Professor Noel Whiteside, Professor of Comparative Public Policy at the University of Warwick, will approach the subject from the historical perspective. What is now "flexibility" was once "casual labour", and social enquiry revealed the consequences of casual labour over a hundred years ago. The nineteenth century founding fathers of social statistics (Charles Booth, Seehbohm Rowntree, A.L. Bowley among others) argued that, to safeguard Britain\\u2019s commercial and imperial pre-eminence, casual employment must be abolished. Theresa May has recently set up a twenty-first century equivalent in the Taylor Review. It is likely to reach similar conclusions. She asks why the social reforms of the early twentieth century designed to tackle the problems of casual labour ultimately failed, and what mistakes we are at risk of making again.