| HR & EMPLOYMENT LAW
Jackie Le Poidevin, Editor-in-Chief, HR Adviser |
Covid Plan B: Your Key Points
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister announced that he was invoking his ‘Plan B’ measures in response to concerns about the Omicron variant. Here, I look at the key points for employers, including whether you should cancel your Christmas party in response to the new variant.
Working from Home
From Monday 13 December, people should work from home if they can. You may not have brought staff back since the last lockdown but, if you have, you’ll need to reactivate your working from home strategy at very short notice.
‘Employers should use the rest of this week to discuss working arrangements with their employees’, Boris Johnson said in his press conference, ‘but from Monday you should work from home if you can. Go to work if you must, but work from home if you can.’
It will be important to focus on whether anything has changed since the last lockdown – for example, do you have new joiners or anyone who has moved house? If you do, you’ll need to ask them to risk assess their home working environment. Does anyone have new housemates and, if so, is there a risk of them seeing or hearing information you want to keep confidential? You may need to ask them to work from a separate room if possible and ensure their laptop can’t be accessed – or just do what they can in the circumstances to avoid confidentiality breaches.
The work from home ‘if they can’ wording suggests that if someone doesn’t have a suitable place to work remotely, or their mental health would suffer due to the isolation, you could perhaps suggest they keep coming into the office. In this case, you would have to make the workplace as safe as possible and ensure the employee was genuinely happy with the arrangement. At the time of writing, the government hadn’t published detailed guidance on the new rules, so you should look out for this on gov.uk and then decide how to deal with this sort of situation.
Face Masks
From Friday 10 December, these are compulsory in most public indoor settings, with exemptions if people are eating, drinking or exercising. Again, you should check the detailed guidance once it’s out if you’re not sure whether masks are required in your business.
Tip: If you’re in a sector where it’s not possible for employees to work from home, I would recommend you review your health and safety measures. Given concerns about how transmissible the Omicron variant is, it would be sensible to see if there’s anything more you should be doing, such as increased social distancing, apart from requiring employees to wear masks.
Self-isolation
The Prime Minister also announced an easing of the self-isolation rules. At the moment, employees who come into contact with someone who has tested positive for the Omicron variant must self-isolate at home for 10 days, regardless of their vaccination status. They will be contacted by NHS Test and Trace if self-isolation is necessary.
However, the government is now planning to let contacts of positive cases take a daily test instead of isolating. No start date has been given but the hope is that this will avoid another ‘pingdemic’ and reduce disruption to businesses.
Timescale
The legislation introducing Plan B will expire in 6 weeks, with a review in 3 weeks.
Should We Cancel Our Christmas Party?
The Prime Minister is still urging people not to cancel their Christmas parties. However, given Number 10’s alleged lax attitude even when gatherings were banned last Christmas, you may prefer to form your own opinion about what’s safe. It’s also not clear, given the requirement to work from home, whether you could hold an event at your office. Even if you can, would employees want to travel in just for this after a day of working from home?
A good starting point would be to speak to staff. If most of them are keen for a party to go ahead, assess whether your plans are still safe or whether you should adjust them. Could you hold your gathering outside, rather than inside, the pub, for example, or open the windows at your chosen venue? Especially if some employees no longer wish to attend, could you increase social distancing? Could you limit the amount of alcohol on offer, as people are less likely to comply with health and safety rules when they’ve been drinking? Obviously, you should ensure no-one feels pressured to attend.
It would also be advisable to urge (or perhaps require) staff to take a lateral flow test before coming to the party and before they next attend work. Having said that, it was recently reported that 68 medics from a hospital in Malaga, Spain, were diagnosed with Covid-19 after attending a Christmas party, even though they had all had a third booster vaccination or an antigen test beforehand. So do think carefully about the reputational and business continuity risks if your party, despite your best efforts, becomes a ‘super spreader’ event. Merry Christmas!
| HEALTH & SAFETY
Michael Ellerby, Editorial Board Member, Health & Safety Adviser and Risk Assessment & Compliance |
Covid-19, Workplace Ventilation and Using Carbon Dioxide Monitors
Covid-19 has been with us for nearly 2 years and businesses are still learning how to cope with it. One simple message to remember is to keep your workplace ventilated to reduce the risk of spreading coronavirus. Good workplace ventilation helps reduce the risk from person-to-person aerosol transmission and so reduces the spread. With the arrival of colder weather, more people are understandably reluctant to keep doors and windows open to ventilate the workplace.
The advice from the Health and Safety Executive is to try and balance ventilation of the premises with keeping people warm at work. Take some simple steps to make sure your workplace is adequately ventilated without workers being too cold, for example:
- By partially opening windows and doors.
- By opening higher-level windows instead, to create fewer draughts.
- If the area is cold, relaxing your company dress code so people can wear extra layers and warmer clothing.
How Do You Know if Your Workplace is Adequately Ventilated?
Use carbon dioxide (CO2) monitors to identify poorly ventilated areas of the workplace. Your risk assessment should identify areas of your workplace that are usually occupied and poorly ventilated. CO2 monitors can help you do this, as people breathe out CO2, which can then build up in the workplace. A build-up of CO2 in an area can indicate that ventilation needs improving. The best portable devices to use in the workplace are non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) CO2 monitors, which measure CO2 levels in parts per million (ppm).
How Much is Too Much CO2?
A consistent CO2 value below 800ppm is likely to indicate that an indoor space is well ventilated. On the other hand, CO2 levels consistently higher than 1500ppm in an occupied room indicate poor ventilation and the need to take action (improve ventilation and/or reduce the number of workers in the area).
How You Can Improve Ventilation
Simple and cheap ways to improve natural ventilation include fully or partly opening windows, air vents and doors.
However, you should never prop open fire doors, the fire services have displayed warning about doing this because fire doors need to remain closed in order to prevent the spread of fire of smoke. By opening them, you are putting people’s safety at risk.
Airing rooms regularly also helps to improve ventilation. Opening all the doors and windows as fully as possible maximises ventilation in a room. You can do this when people leave for a break and even 10 minutes an hour can help reduce the risk from virus in the air, depending on the size of the room.
If you have mechanical ventilation, ensure that it is working properly and serviced regularly. Ensure that you understand how it works and use it appropriately to improve workplace ventilation. On some mechanical systems, the amount of fresh air taken in can be controlled. Beware of systems that only recirculate air without drawing in fresh ar. Monitor such systems carefully (CO2 monitor) and open windows as required.
Other Simple Steps You Can Take
- Review your company’s dress code, and allow workers to wear more layers to tolerate cooler, more ventilated conditions.
- Set the heating to maintain a comfortable temperature even when windows and doors are open and review other sources of heating.
- Reduce the number of people in the workspace (such as by home or hybrid working, if appropriate).
| PAYROLL
Sarah Bradford, Editor-in-Chief, Pay & Benefits Adviser |
Your Key Points About Paying Employees Early at Christmas
If you shut down over the Christmas and the New Year period, you may pay your employees early in December. If this is the case, it is important that you follow HMRC’s guidelines to ensure that the payments are reported correctly.
Use the Usual Payday
The normal rule is that you must report payments made to employees and any deductions made from those payments to HMRC at or before the time that the payment is made to the employee, by submitting a Full Payment Submission (FPS). It is important that payments are made on time as penalties may be charged if the FPS is submitted late on more than one occasion in the tax year.
Where payments are made earlier than the normal payday, which may be the case over the Christmas period or where the normal payday falls on a bank holiday, this rule is modified. Rather than using the actual day as the payment date, you should use the normal payday instead, and ensure that the FPS is submitted to HMRC before the usual payday.
For example, if you normally pay your employees monthly on the last day of the calendar month, but because you are shut for 2 weeks over the Christmas period, you pay your employees for December on Friday 17th December, you should use your usual payday of 31 December as the payment date on the FPS, rather than the actual payment date of 17 December. The FPS must reach HMRC by 31 December – as long as it is submitted by this date it is treated as being filed on time, even if you send the FPS after the actual payment date of 17 December.
HMRC do allow a 3-day period of grace for occasional late filings. This will run from the usual payday rather than the actual payday where payment is made early.
Importance of Correct Reporting for Universal Credit Claimants
It is important that the above procedures are followed as failure to do so may affect employees’ entitlement to Universal Credit. If the actual payday is used rather than the usual payday, employees who are paid monthly and who are entitled to Universal Credit, will receive two payments in earnings in one Universal Credit assessment period, and none in another assessment period.
As Universal Credit varies depending on earnings, where two payments fall into one assessment period, the employee may lose out on the work allowance. This is the amount of earnings that the employee can keep before their Universal Credit entitlement is reduced. Using the usual payday to report the payment rather than the actual payment date, prevents this from happening, as one payment of earnings will fall in each Universal Credit assessment period.
Where employees are paid other than monthly, payments are not reallocated to another assessment period as there will always be an assessment period which has additional earnings. For example, where employees are paid four-weekly, they will receive 13 payments in a calendar year. Consequently, there will always be one Universal Credit assessment period in which there are two payments of earnings.