Should my apprentice continue their training during the coronavirus outbreak, even if they’re furloughed?
The Government maintains that apprenticeships will be an important part in the economic recovery post-lockdown and therefore ESFA is encouraging training under apprenticeships to continue, even where an apprentice is furloughed, provided that the training does not provide services to or generate income for their employer. E-learning is being encouraged as a method of delivery.
Related FAQs
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
Yes, but the Courts have been temporarily restructured into three categories:
- Open courts (open for business including vital in person hearings)
- Staffed courts (for video and telephone hearings)
- Suspended courts (no hearings of any kind)
These changes have been effective from Monday 30 March 2020.
The outbreak is certainly going to have an impact on new lease negotiations.
Undoubtedly many transactions will be put on hold or indeed stop entirely. Where matters are ongoing, tenants may well look to strengthen rent suspension provision.
It is also possible that tenants and their representatives will also now seek to include termination rights for unseen events. In this regard, the concept of force majeure may start to appear more often in leases.
In both of the examples above, such attempts are not likely to be well received from landlords who will undoubtedly suggest that tenants ensure that their business interruption insurance policies are robust enough to protect the tenant in the event of any future pandemic events.
Another approach tenants might adopt going forwards in negotiations for a new lease (or indeed seeking to vary existing leases), is to move away from the traditional market rent model to a turnover rent arrangement. This will offer some protection going forward if trading conditions deteriorate, but again getting institutional landlords to agree such an approach may prove difficult.
Many planning permissions contain a condition restricting the hours within which a developer can carry out construction work or are subject to an approved construction management plan setting out the permitted construction hours.
The Business and Planning Act 2020 entered the statute books on 22 July 2020. Section 16 of the Act incorporates a new S.74B into the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The effect is that any condition/approved document which limits construction hours on a site could be amended through an application to the local planning authority. The application to the local planning authority must set out the date on which the proposed extension to construction hours shall cease (such date being no later than 1 April 2021, after which the original conditions over construction hours will resume). The local planning authority must determine the application within 14 days (beginning with the day after the application was submitted) otherwise there is deemed approval.
New guidance has been published alongside the Act and is available here
Put simply, if it is a requirement of a particular role that PPE is worn, then this should be provided to the employee. If an employer dismissed an employee for refusal to carry out their role due to lack of PPE then this is likely to be an automatically unfair health and safety dismissal.
Furthermore, anyone who is subject to a detriment as a result of raising a health and safety concern, e.g. someone in this situation who refuses to work due to lack of PPE and is sent home without pay, will also have a potentially valid claim in the Employment Tribunal for that detriment, even if they are not dismissed.