Can apprentices be furloughed?

• Do not require them to work
• Continue to communicate with and support them
• Allow them to work from home, is there alternative work for them to do if they can’t do their work from home
• Offer SSP or allow them to take holiday if they want to.

The European Commission has reintroduced its “comfort letter” system for cooperation in relation to shortage of supply. This allows cooperating businesses to check what the Commission’s view of their proposals are before implementing them.

In the UK context the SMA has introduced an exemption for suppliers of healthcare services to the NHS. This allows:

• Sharing information about capacity
• Coordination of staff deployment
• Joint purchasing of goods, services and facilities
• Sharing or lending of facilities
• Division of activities, including agreeing whether to expand or reduce the volume or type of services provided by suppliers

In relation to whether the CMA will investigate cooperation, it has indicated:

• The CMA will use its discretion as to the prioritisation of its enforcement action to permit some agreements/collaboration which would otherwise potentially give rise to enforcement action (including potentially attracting fines of up to 10% of group worldwide turnover)
• The CMA will use its existing power to exempt certain agreements under the Competition Act 1998 where these are in the public interest

On 7 May the Government published guidance on how contracting parties can act responsibly in order to assist the effort to deal with Covid-19. The guidance seeks to persuade contracting parties to act reasonably and recognise the impact of Covid-19 on contractual counterparties. This will continue to be relevant as business begins to emerge from lockdown.

The guidance states that people should aim to wear a face-covering in indoor spaces where social distancing is not always possible and they come into contact with others, for example on public transport or in some shops, and potentially in the workplace. Face coverings do not mean face masks such as clinical masks worn by certain key workers as PPE, which should be reserved for those people.

Staff working in areas that are open to the public must wear face coverings, this includes:

• shops
• supermarkets
• bars
• pubs
• restaurants
• cafes
• banks
• estate agents
• post offices
• public areas of hotels and hostels

If these businesses have taken steps in line with Health and Safety Executive guidance for COVID-19 secure workplaces to create a physical barrier between workers and members of the public then staff behind the barrier will not be required to wear a face covering.

For other indoor settings, employers should assess the use of face coverings on a case by case basis depending on the workplace environment, other appropriate mitigations they have put in place, and whether reasonable exemptions apply.

Mortuaries are a sui generis use, unless ancillary to some other use of land, a hospital for example.

Sui generis uses are not within any Use Class. Consequently planning permission is required for the:

• Change in the use to a sui generis use
• Subsequently for the change in the use to an alternative use, whether that be another sui generis use or a use within a Use Class

Acknowledging the above, if the scale of the use is above de minimis, planning permission is likely to be required to change the use of a warehouse or factory unit into a temporary mortuary.

Should planning control be breached, a local planning authority must decide whether to take enforcement action or not. That enforcement is discretionary was recently reiterated in a Ministerial Statement issued on 13 March 2020 a link to which is below.

https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2020-03-13/HCWS159/

Depending on the form of the enforcement action, there could be a right of appeal.