How can workers get to work safely?
The Government’s guidance says walk, cycle or drive to work and avoid public transport if you can. Businesses will need to support workers in adopting alternative travel methods to reduce exposure to the virus. You could consider staggering start and finish times for shifts to reduce commuting during peak hours, or support cycling with secure storage facilities and a drying room.
Related FAQs
On Tuesday 23rd June, partner Emma Digby was in conversation with Steve Hamstead and Mark Smith from AON along with Ward Hadaway commercial lawyer Nathan Bilton in a webinar titled Can trade credit insurance help to keep the supply chain moving?
The insurance market is under untold pressure as a result of the pandemic, and in such times there is a risk that insurers will cancel or reduce credit lines, particularly in certain high risk sectors such as retail. However the Government has stepped in to effectively underwrite the existing trade credit insurance agreements, and to keep trade supplies moving. Will this be enough?
In this webinar, we discussed:
- the Government backed scheme and how it will operate
- the prospects of obtaining insurance going forward, and whether it will become too cost prohibitive
- could the new legislation put your business at risk and jeopardise your insurance cover if you cannot cancel a contract when you are not getting paid for your goods or services
- the Brexit effect, and how this will affect the insurance market
- protecting your business with proper risk assessment processes and paperwork
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has issued a number of guidance documents about the application of competition law rules during the coronavirus outbreak. In general, the competition law rules are being relaxed in very specific circumstances.
You will claim a pro rata’d amount of 80% of salary, based on the proportion of hours not worked out of the employee’s normal working hours (their “usual” hours).
There are 2 ways to calculate an employee’s usual hours, depending on whether they have fixed or variable hours/pay:
- For those with fixed hours/pay, you take the number of hours worked in the pay period before 19 March 2020.
- For those with variable hours/pay, you take the higher of:
- the average number of hours worked in the tax year 2019 to 2020 or
- the corresponding calendar period in the tax year 2019 to 2020.
If employees are paid per task or piece of work done, you should work out the usual hours for these employees in the same way as for other employees who work variable hours, if possible.
When you calculate the usual hours, you should include any hours of leave for which they were paid their full contracted rate (such as annual leave) and any hours worked as overtime (but only if the pay for those hours was not discretionary).
If you don’t want to make redundancies, or if you can’t reduce employee resource, either in a particular department or across the workforce as a whole, then you need to think about alternatives to redundancy.
Equally, you may want to flex the resource you have available to you – without making drastic changes. For example you may want to consider:
- unpaid leave and sabbaticals
- retraining and redeploying
- forcing annual leave
- flexible working
- capability issues
- lay off
- short time working
- reductions in salary
- reductions in working hours
- changing to shift working
The Charity commission has issued the following guidance
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-for-the-charity-sector