JD Sports and its staffing agency, Assist Recruitment, deny allegations of poor working conditions at the sportswear chain’s Rochdale warehouse, according to media reports.

The companies are responding to an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, which alleges a litany of harsh practices inside the vast JD Sports warehouse in Rochdale, including punitive disciplinary procedures, intense surveillance and security, heightened job insecurity amongst agency workers and intimidation.

Assist Recruitment, a member of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, has an average of 800 employees working at JD Sports at any one time. Assist also provides temporary workers to Argos, Mitras Automotive, Morrisons Supermarkets, Culina and Enterprise, a national services provider across the utilities, defence and public sector markets. The firm was declared the fastest growing company in North West Business Insider magazine’s 2016 list of top 100 fastest growing companies with revenues of £18.2 million.

Iain Wright MP, Chairman of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee told Channel 4 News he would be calling JD Sports to appear before the Committee. After viewing the TV footage, Mr Wright said he believed workers at JD Sports were being “exploited” and “treated like scum”.

JD Sports and Assist Recruitment issued a statement in which they deny the channel’s claims.

“A number of Channel 4’s key claims are simply not true. Most importantly, we categorically do not operate a ‘strike’ system and our workers cannot get fired ‘on the spot’,” the statement said. “We have a fully outlined disciplinary procedure and appeal process based on the ACAS code of practice. Furthermore, our time and attendance system is specifically designed to ensure that all workers from both companies are paid for the time it takes to go through security on leaving the site; and we pay all employees in full who are up to 15 minutes late on arrival.”

Nevertheless, Assist will be launching an investigation into the implementation of their policies at JD Sports’ Kingsway facility. They announced: “While we maintain that the policies and procedures in place are robust and fair, it is clear that we need to do better in their implementation. In the short term, we intend to retrain all supervisory and security employees at the facility, as a matter of urgency, to ensure that those policies are correctly reflected across the workplace.”