I have been a contractor for about 4 years and I have had ups and downs.
I recommend the jobsites:
http://www.jobserve.com/it/jobserve/homepage.asp http://www.skillsite.co.uk http://www.cwjobs.co.uk http://www.theitjobboard.com/ Contracting is great for the independence and the money is generally quite good in comparison to permie roles. However you need to have a set of skills that is fairly defined, in fashion and easily pigeon-holable by recruitment consultants. Once your skills evolve more towards management / Consulting it is very difficult to fit in a defined profile and to find something. Also the contracting world is very much doing more of the same all the time with your skill set getting banalised and eventually your daily rate suffering. Also you don't feel like you are developing in the job as you are always recruited for what you know how to do and not what you have the potential to do.
For all those reasons I have decided to give up the contract world and took a good position in a Consultancy instead. So far it definitely feels like a good choice as I am being challenged into interesting projects that I would never have touched as a contractor.
Besides money-wise you get hit pretty hard by IR35 and when you calculate what's left at the end of the day, it is not necessarily that much better. All that to say that Contracting is not all the rosy stuff that people make it to be.