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HR & EMPLOYMENT LAW Jackie Le Poidevin, Editor-in-Chief, HR Adviser |
Rights for Parents and Carers Become Law: What You Need to Know
Enhanced rights for working parents and carers have moved a step closer after three government-backed private member’s bills completed their passage through Parliament. After receiving Royal Assent, the bills have become the Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023, the Protection from Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Act 2023 and the Carer’s Leave Act 2023. However, none of the new protections will take effect until the government introduces regulations setting out details of precisely how the entitlements will work. We summarise the rights employees will be gaining.
Carer’s Leave Act 2023
This will give employees who have a dependant with a long-term care need the right to 1 week’s unpaid care leave each year. This will be a Day 1 right and employees won’t need to provide evidence of how they will be using the leave or who they will be using it for. They will be able to take their leave flexibly rather than in a single block to help them meet their caring commitments.
This entitlement is expected to come into effect in April 2024 at the earliest.
Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023
This will allow eligible employed parents to take up to 12 weeks’ leave if their baby is admitted to neonatal care within the first 4 weeks following the birth. Employees will have the right to take such leave from Day 1 of employment but they must have at least 26 weeks’ service to be entitled to pay. The leave will be on top of existing entitlements such as maternity and paternity leave.
The new right isn’t expected to come into force until April 2025.
Protection from Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Act 2023
This will extend the redundancy protections that currently apply to employees on maternity, adoption or shared parental leave to cover pregnancy and an as-yet-unspecified period after the new parent has returned to work.
The length of this ‘protected period’ will be set out in regulations but we expect it to last from the date an employee notifies her employer of her pregnancy until 6 months after the end of the maternity or other family leave. During this period, you will have to give the employee priority for any suitable alternative vacancies in a redundancy situation.
What Should You Do Now?
There’s nothing you need to do right now. Some details of the new rights are still unclear and there are no firm implementation dates. However, it’s important to be aware that these changes are in the pipeline. For the moment, our advice is to:
- Educate managers to fulfil their existing legal duties. Employees already have the Day 1 right to take unpaid emergency dependants leave and to request flexible working after 6 months’ employment. There’s also the risk of automatic unfair dismissal or discrimination claims if you treat pregnant workers or new mothers badly.
- Encourage managers to get to know their team, so they can understand their responsibilities outside work and offer support as appropriate.
- Review your policies and think whether you can go beyond the current legal minimum. For example, could you offer some paid compassionate leave or offer all staff the right to apply for temporary or permanent flexible working from Day 1 in the job? Anything you can do to reduce parents’ and carers’ stress and improve their work-life balance is likely to pay dividends through improved employee retention and an enhanced reputation among job seekers.
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HEALTH & SAFETY Michael Ellerby, Editorial Board Member, Health & Safety Adviser and Risk Assessment & Compliance |
3 Steps to Get on Board with the Dust Kills Campaign
Over 500 construction workers are believed to die from exposure to silica dust every year. Regularly breathing in dust can cause life changing and potentially fatal diseases like lung cancer and other cancers, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and silicosis. Construction workers are at a high risk of developing these diseases because many common construction tasks can create high dust levels. The HSE believes there are thousands of preventable cases of irreversible lung disease and so have developed the Dust Kills Campaign.
How You Can Reduce the Impact of Dust-related Adverse Effects
Whether your business is construction, food manufacturing, milling, cleaning or feeding livestock, dust is often present in these occupations. To protect yourself, your business and, importantly, your staff and colleagues from workplace dust exposure, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Conduct an Assessment to Establish if You have a Problem with Dust
As part of your assessment process, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is the material we are using naturally dusty?
- Does the work we do create dust by mechanical or other means?
- Is the dust liable to be disturbed?
- How could my team be exposed to dust e.g. inhalation, skin contact, ingestion, contact with eyes?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, then your next step is to think about how your team many be exposed e.g. through inhalation, skin contact, ingestion, contact with eyes.
Step 2: Prevention and Control Exposure
Visible dust on pipes, surfaces, ledges, etc. may indicate the presence of airborne dust. However, many dust particles are too fine to be visible under normal lighting conditions. Using a dust lamp provides a powerful beam of light, and is a quick method to show whether a fine dust is present – with training, you could use this yourself or use a competent third party.
Once you have established if airborne dust is present, take action to eliminate or reduce the health effects by implementing control strategies as outlined below.
Prevention. Where possible, you should prevent dust forming or developing from your work activities. Examples of how you can do this include:
- Eliminating dust by using special cutting techniques rather than by grinding or sawing, or by using wet-cutting processes.
- Using less toxic materialg. powdered alumina instead of flit or quartz as in the pottery industry.
- Using pellets rather than dusty power.
- Using dust-suppression materials and emulsion or pastes rather than mixing dry constituents.
Control of exposure. Where it is not reasonably practicable to prevent exposure to dust, a combination of engineering and process controls may be appropriate, for example:
- Segregating the work area or totally enclosing the potentially dusty process.
- Providing extraction by Local Exhaust Ventilation (LEV) where total enclosure is not possible.
- Using mechanical handling systems and closed containers.
- Damping down materials where the process permits it.
- Minimising the height that materials are allowed to fall.
Provide training. You should provide your employees and other people on the premises with suitable and sufficient information, instruction and training. Don’t just hand them a page of written information. Some good examples are:
- Make sure that workers understand the risks to health.
- Show workers how to effectively use control measures and check they are working.
- Carry out practice drills for cleaning up spills safely.
- If PPE or RPE is required, show them how to use it correctly and ensure a face fit test is carried out for RPE.
Undertake health surveillance. This is appropriate in certain cases, for example, where:
- Employees are exposed to a dust linked to a particular disease or adverse health effect.
- There is a reasonable likelihood under the conditions of work that the disease or adverse health effect might occur.
- It is possible to detect the disease or adverse health effect, and the means of detection is low risk to the employe.
- Employees should report any symptoms of dust-induced chest or skin disease such as tightness of breath or skin rashes. They should be alert to spotting defects in dust control equipment and report them. Also, they must ask for information about dust hazards if they are unsure.
Step 3: Involve Your Workers
Involve your workers in developing control measures to make sure they are suitable for the way they carry out the work. Encourage them to suggest improvement and to report anything they think might be going wrong.
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PAYROLL Sarah Bradford, Editor-in-Chief, Pay & Benefits Adviser |
Have You Claimed the Employment Allowance Yet?
The Employment Allowance is an allowance that is available to eligible employers which they can set against their secondary Class 1 National Insurance liability. The allowance is set at £5,000 for 2023/24. If you qualify, you must claim it as it is not given automatically, even if you claimed it in the past.
Do You Qualify?
You will be able to claim the Employment Allowance for 2023/24 if you are a business or a charity (including a community amateur sports club) and your employer’s (secondary) Class 1 National Insurance bill was less than £100,000 in 2022/23 and you are not an excluded employer. If you are part of a group, the £100,000 limit applies to the group as a whole.
Similarly, if you run more than one payroll, your total employer’s Class 1 National Insurance bill across all your payrolls must be less than £100,000 for 2022/23. You can only claim the Employment Allowance against one of your payrolls.
When working out whether you fall within the £100,000 limit, you do not need to include any secondary Class 1 National Insurance contributions on deemed payments to off-payroll workers providing their services via an intermediary.
Certain employers are excluded, even if they pass this test.
Understand the Exclusions
Some employers are not allowed to claim the Employment Allowance regardless of whether their secondary Class 1 National Insurance bill was less than £100,000 in 2022/23.
If you are a public body or a business doing more than 50% of your work in the public sector, you are not eligible to claim the Employment Allowance. This exclusion does not apply to charities.
Personal companies where the sole employee is also a director are also excluded from claiming the allowance.
The Allowance
For 2023/24, the allowance is set at the lower of £5,000 and your secondary Class National Insurance liability for the year. So, for example, if your secondary Class 1 liability for 2023/24 is £3,750, your Employment Allowance for the year will be £3,750 – not £5,000 – it is not possible to carry forward the difference between your liability for the year and £5,000.
The allowance can only be used to reduce the secondary Class 1 National Insurance that you pay over to HMRC – it cannot be set against any Class 1A or Class 1B liability that you may have.
The allowance reduces the secondary Class 1 National Insurance that you need to pay over to HMRC until it is used up. For example, if you secondary Class 1 liability is £2,000 per month, you will pay no secondary Class 1 National Insurance to HMRC in months 1 and 2. In month 3, you will pay £1,000 over to HMRC – the remaining £1,000 of the allowance being set against your liability for that month. As the £5,000 has now been fully used, from month 4 onwards you will need to pay your full secondary liability for the month over to HMRC.
Making a Claim
The allowance is not given automatically and must be claimed. This is done via your payroll software by ticking the relevant box and submitting an Employer Payment Summary (EPS). The claim can be made at any point in the year – if you did not claim it at the start of 2023/24, you can make the claim next time you run your payroll. The earlier you claim, the earlier your will get the benefit of the allowance.
If you forgot to claim for previous years, you can also make claims for 2018/19 and later tax years. For 2018/19 and 2019/29, the £100,000 limit on secondary Class 1 contributions in the previous tax year did not apply.
If you claim late after you have paid your secondary Class 1 National Insurance for the year over to HMRC, you can use the allowance against any tax, VAT or National Insurance that you owe if you do not owe anything under PAYE. If you have no outstanding liabilities, you can claim a refund after the end of the tax year.