Guidance and Legislation

The Department for Work and Pensions has published guidance in the form of a Factsheet for employers making redundancies.  It directs employers to the UK Government Rapid Response Service, provided via Jobcentre Plus, which is designed to give support to both employers and employees facing redundancy as well as a number of other sources of useful information.

The Insolvency Service has published an updated HR1 form (used to give advance notice of redundancies to the Redundancy Payments Service) and accompanying guidance for employers carrying out collective redundancy procedures.

The Access to Work Scheme  has been extended so those working from home or in the workplace with a disability will be eligible for extra help including support for special equipment, travel costs and mental health.  Funding can be fast tracked for those in the clinically extremely vulnerable group.

News

Analysis by Centre for Cities suggests that one in six UK workers have returned to the office.  The report looked at Britain's 63 largest cities and found worker footfall in cities averaging at 17% of pre lockdown levels during the first two weeks of August.  US Bank Morgan Stanley's research unit AlphaWise has also found that British office workers have been slower to return to the office than staff in France (where the wearing of masks has recently become mandatory), Germany, Italy or Spain.  Only 34% of UK white collar employees have gone back to work compared with 68% of their European counterparts.

According to a YouGov survey of 4,000 workers, one third do not expect to return to the office until 2021, with 8% expecting to continue working from home indefinitely.  These aspirations may not be too far off the mark for some - PricewaterhouseCoopers has announced that most of their workers will not be expected to return to the office full-time after the pandemic, as have Schroders, and other employers are likely to follow.

ONS statistics show the number of people on furlough continues to drop.  In the two weeks until 9 August, 12% of the UK workforce were on furlough, down 14% compared to the previous fortnight and half as much as the number recorded two months earlier.  Overall, the total number of furloughed workers has dropped by more than 60% since its peak.

A poll of 6,000 carried out by Citizen's Advice has found that parents, carers and disabled workers are twice as likely to face redundancy compared to the rest of the working age population.  The report, An unequal crisis, also showed that nearly half of workers classified as clinically extremely vulnerable who had been shielding were also now at risk of redundancy.  This is despite ONS data showing two thirds of those would be comfortable returning to the workplace as long as robust safety measures were in place.

A survey of 200 UK businesses suggests that homeworking has led to increases in cybersecurity breaches.  Two fifths of the businesses surveyed had dismissed employees because of cybersecurity breaches since the start of the pandemic, with nearly 60% believing that working from home made employees less likely to follow the security protocols.  Over half of the respondents have subsequently banned, or plan to ban, staff from using personal devices to work from home, with a similar number implementing more measures to securely authenticate employees such as fingerprint and facial recognition technology and multi-factor authentication steps.