NEARLY a quarter of all unemployed adults in Britain have been offered exploitative zero-hours contracts with no guarantees of full-time employment, according to survey revealed yesterday.

Out of the 23 per cent of people who said bosses and jobcentre staff had presented them with this idea, almost half chose unemployment over being strung along with irregular schedule and wages.

But a fifth said that they did not know what a zero-hours contract was. The figure rises to 28 per cent among out-of-work Londoners — the highest in Britain, researchers found.

Jobseekers who do not know about zero-hours contracts are the “most vulnerable” if they do not know the implications, pollsters at recruitment company Glassdoor added.

A huge 69 per cent accepted a zero-hours contract as they desperately needed the money.

Glassdoor career expert Jon Ingham said: “People who take zero-hours contracts generally do so because they feel they have to, rather than want to.

“This could be interpreted as employers exploiting the most vulnerable — namely people who really need the money.”

Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to ban zero-hours contracts and to replace them with a weekly minimum number of hours on contracts.

At least 700,000 people in Britain are on the hated contracts, according to Office for National Statistics data. More than 70,000 are in the retail and wholesale industries.

The practice has come under fire in recent years as workers say that bosses often call them at very short notice to demand they go into work, even just for a few hours.

It is not financially viable to stop claiming benefits, said most of the 1,001 respondents, to earn irregular and low wages when they could be applying for more secure jobs.

Half of those who had rejected zero-hours contracts said that they did not trust the employer purely because of zero hours being suggested in the first place.

Older people are more likely to reject zero hours because they have to support families and keep up with paying bills.

Only 24 per cent of those aged over 55 would accept one, compared to 47 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds.