|
HR & EMPLOYMENT LAW Jackie Le Poidevin, Editor-in-Chief, HR Adviser |
Prepare for the New Right to Neonatal Care Leave
From 6 April this year, employees will gain the right to take neonatal care leave if their newborn baby needs prolonged medical care. Although the Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act was passed back in May 2023 under the previous Conservative Government, draft regulations setting out details of the new entitlement have only recently been published. Here, we look at what your new obligations will be and what steps you need to take now.
Discover Your New Duties
The regulations are still in draft form, so it’s possible some details may change. We’re also waiting for practical guidance to help employers and employees understand the new rights. However, this is how the provisions currently look:
- Neonatal Care Leave (NCL)
NCL will be a Day 1 right. Employees whose baby is born after 6 April will be eligible for NCL if the child needs uninterrupted neonatal care for at least 7 days before they are 28 days old.
Neonatal care means:
- Medical care in a hospital.
- Medical care outside hospital if it’s under a consultant’s direction and includes ongoing monitoring and visits by healthcare professionals.
- Palliative or end-of-life care.
Parents will be entitled to 1 week’s leave for each week of neonatal care, starting the day after the care begins and capped at 12 weeks’ leave.
Parents may be on another form of family leave like maternity or paternity leave when their baby needs neonatal care. They can therefore tag NCL onto the end of that leave or take it at some point within 68 weeks of the birth. The idea is that they will still get to spend the same amount of time with their child outside of a hospital environment as other parents.
- Notice Requirements
These differ depending on when NCL is taken:
- If the parent takes NCL while the baby is receiving care or up to a week after care ends, this is called ‘tier 1 leave’. The employee can take tier 1 leave in non-continuous blocks of at least a week. They must give you notice that they are taking NCL before the start of each week. This doesn’t have to be in writing. In practice, Tier 1 leave will usually be taken by fathers or partners who have already used up their paternity leave (whereas mothers who are eligible for maternity leave will remain on this).
- Leave taken later is ‘tier 2 leave’. Employees must take such leave in a single block. They must also give 15 days’ written notice if they wish to take 1 week’s NCL or 28 days’ notice before taking 2 or more weeks.
You can waive the notice requirements if you wish.
- Pay
Employees will be entitled to statutory neonatal care pay if they:
- Have 26 weeks’ continuous service.
- Have average earnings of at least £123 a week.
NCL will be paid at the same rate as statutory paternity pay (£187.18 from April).
Understand the Protections for Employees on NCL
These will mirror the protections that apply to employees on other kinds of family leave. Employees on NCL will therefore have:
- The right to return to the same or another suitable role.
- Redundancy protection during NCL and for a period afterwards.
- Protection from detrimental treatment and being dismissed because they took or sought to take NCL.
- The right to keep their existing terms and conditions during NCL except for pay.
What To Do Now
Once the Regulations are in force, you should:
- Update your family leave policies to include the new right to NCL.
- Communicate the changes to employees.
- Brief managers on the new right.
|
PAYROLL Sarah Bradford, Editor-in-Chief, Pay & Benefits Adviser |
HMRC Drop Requirement to Report Employees’ Hours
HMRC have decided not to go ahead with controversial plans to require employers to provide more detailed information on the hours actually worked by employees. The measure was due to come into effect from April 2026 – 1 year later than originally planned after HMRC acknowledged that there was insufficient time for employers to prepare for these changes. The announcement will come as a relief to employers who would have needed to spend money upgrading software in order to meet the additional reporting requirements and on whom the additional reporting would have imposed an extra administrative burden.
Background
Back in 2022, the then Conservative Government published a consultation document setting out proposals for improving the data that HMRC collects from its customers. The consultation focused on six areas, one of which was the hours actually worked by employees. While some employers may routinely collect this information, for example, where employees are required to complete timesheets for the purpose of billing clients, many employers don’t and have no need for this information.
HMRC’s reasons for wanting to collect this data included enabling them to better understand the labour market and also to allow them to correctly enforce the National Minimum Wage legislation.
Your Legal Duties
Employers have a statutory duty to ensure that workers are paid at least the National Living Wage or the National Minimum Wage for their age. As employers are only required to provide details of the band in which the employee’s normal hours fall, rather than the actual hours worked, it is not possible for HMRC to determine the employee’s hourly rate for the hours actually worked, and whether this at least equal to the statutory minimum.
Employers are currently required to identify which of four bands an employee’s normal hours fall. The existing bands were designed to provide information to assess eligibility for working tax credits. However, the level of detail is insufficient to enable NLW/NMW underpayments to be identified, other than in the case of extreme underpayments.
The consultation proposed requiring employers to enter the number of hours actually worked in the pay period rather than the band into which the employee’s normal hours fell, or alternatively, adding a new band ‘other’, with a requirement for the employer to explain why an employee fell within this band.
A summary of responses to the consultation was published in April 2023. Respondents felt that while it would be relatively easy to identity actual hours worked for hourly paid workers and for salaried workers working stable hours, concerns were raised around the accuracy and complexity in collating the data in more complex cases and the cost and administrative burden associated with complying with the proposal.
The Draft Regulations
Draft regulations (the draft Income Tax (Pay As Your Earn) (Amendment) (No. xxx) Regulations) were published for consultation in March 2024 detailing the information on employee hours that employers would be required to provide.
The final consultation outcome was published in January 2025. It was announced that while HMRC will go ahead with their proposals to collect additional data in other areas, having taken on board the concerns of employers as to the additional administrative burden that complying with the draft regulations would entail, they will not be progressing the regulations and the requirement to report actual hours worked.
Reporting of Normal Hours to Continue
The existing requirement to report normal hours under RTI will continue in its present form. Employers will need to specify which of the following bands the employee’s hours fall by entering:
- ‘A’ if this is less than 16 hours
- ‘B’ if this is 16 to 23.99 hours
- ‘C’ if this is 24 to 29.99 hours
- ‘D’ if this is 30 hours or more.