KNOWLEDGE

February Employment Law COVID-19 Round up

Morton Fraser Consultant Carrie Mitchell
Author
Carrie Mitchell
Consultant
PUBLISHED:
05 February 2021
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category:
Blog

Our monthly round up of the COVID-19 news you may have missed 

Guidance and Legislation

HMRC has updated its guidance on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) to include advice on how employers can request that their CJRS claim information is not published if they believe publication will lead to a serious risk of violence or intimidation. This follows last November's announcement that the names of all employers who claim furlough from December 2020 onwards will be published as a means of promoting transparency and deterring fraudulent claims. HMRC will not publish an employer's details until a decision has been made about the application and the employer has been informed. The first list, published at the end of January 2021, named over 741,000 employers.

The Scottish Government has published detailed statutory guidance on working from home. Its intention is to support employers and the self-employed who continue to work from home as required by Scottish Government instruction and also by legislation which came into effect on 5 January 2021. The guidance applies to any sector where working from home is possible. It repeats the message that individuals should stay at home unless they have a reasonable excuse for leaving the house, such as not being able to work from home. It also requires employers to take every possible step to facilitate their employees working from home and creates a presumption that if staff worked from home during the first lockdown, they should be doing so again. The guidance also highlights that the health, safety and welfare of employees is still the responsibility of the employer, wherever their staff are working and includes an operational guide and checklist to assist employers in considering the necessary factors for implementing home working.  Although this guidance has been drafted in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic the guidance states that it can also be used as a tool for an ongoing and continued shift in employer policies towards incorporating higher levels of homeworking in a post-COVID landscape.

Furlough guidance has also been updated to make clear that if an employee’s health has been affected by coronavirus or any other conditions they can be furloughed. This includes if they are unable to work from home or working reduced hours because they:

  • are clinically extremely vulnerable, or at the highest risk of severe illness from coronavirus and following public health guidance;

or

  • have caring responsibilities resulting from coronavirus (COVID-19), such as caring for children who are at home as a result of school and childcare facilities closing, or caring for a vulnerable individual in their household

This clarifies previous uncertainty around the eligibility of parents to be furloughed for childcare responsibilities, with the positon being that furlough is available.

News

A recent survey of 750 executives has revealed that nearly a quarter of employers plan to mandate vaccination against COVID-19 for their staff.  This follows on from news that employers are planning on using IT systems to track which workers have been vaccinated.  Pimlico Plumbers - the London based firm famed in employment law circles as the respondent in the UK's most widely publicised employment status case - was one of the first companies to announce its intention to require workers to be vaccinated. The company plans to rewrite all of its employee and worker contracts to require vaccination and where people do not comply with the policy, their future employment will be decided on a case-by-case basis.  Contracts for new starts will also be changed to require immunisation.  The company chairman is willing to pay for employees to receive private vaccinations on company time, if this becomes an option in the future, and he has already set aside £800,000 to cover this eventuality. Pimlico employees apparently approve of this policy. However, this proposal is not without legal risk - for more on that see our blog on whether employers can require workers to be vaccinated.

The Swiss insurance firm, Zurich, has introduced an extra ten days' fully paid lockdown leave for its employees in the UK who are parents and/or carers for elderly parents. This leave may be taken individually or consecutively and benefits more than one in five of its 4,500 UK employees.  The UK Government recently confirmed that people may be furloughed for caring responsibilities, following calls from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Labour Party to provide greater support for parents during the current lockdown.  The TUC said its research showed that during the first lockdown in March, when schools were closed, one in six mothers had to reduce their working hours because of school and nursery closures. However, the UK Government has refused to give parents an enforceable right to request furlough. This was despite being pushed on findings from a recent survey of 50,000 women carried out by the TUC which showed that 71% of mothers who requested furlough for childcare reasons in January 2021 had seen their requests refused.

With firms having to adapt to the financial impact of Covid-19 on their business, several have reported the benefits of moving to a four-day working week. Target Publishing, an Essex based company, reported that on introducing a four-day week staff worked much more effectively and there were huge benefits for their employees' mental health.  In a recent report, think-tank Autonomy maintained that a steep rise in unemployment could be prevented if the Chancellor supported a four-day working week. Some big names in industry have also made this change, with Unilever in New Zealand moving its staff to a four-day working week on the same pay for a 12-month pilot period. A similar trial run by Microsoft in its Japanese operations reported a 40% increase in productivity. It remains to be seen whether this will trigger a widespread change in working patterns.

Disclaimer

The content of this webpage is for information only and is not intended to be construed as legal advice and should not be treated as a substitute for specific advice. Morton Fraser LLP accepts no responsibility for the content of any third party website to which this webpage refers.  Morton Fraser LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.