Which charities will benefit from this funding and when – Key Services?

Under usual rules, workers are entitled to a minimum of 28 days holiday including bank holidays, each year. Except in limited circumstances, it cannot be carried between leave years meaning that workers lose their holiday if they do not take it.

The government passed emergency legislation relaxing the carry-over of the 20 days leave entitlement provided under EU law. Where it is not reasonably practicable for an employee to take leave in the relevant leave year as a result of the effects of the coronavirus then they could be entitled to carry over the untaken leave into the next year.

The first point to note is that it is the position as at 14 February 2022 which is relevant, as whether or not a lease is a ‘qualifying lease’ for the purposes of recovering costs under the Building Safety Act was effectively frozen at that time.

If a leaseholder owned more than three properties in the UK (and the property in question was not their principal home) at that time, then the lease will not be a qualifying lease. The protections under the Act which prevent or restrict the landlord’s ability to recover the cost of remedial works through the service charge will not therefore apply to that lease (save potentially for the provision that costs cannot be recovered where the landlord is responsible for the defects, which does not expressly refer to qualifying leases).

The lack of a searchable database to assess how many properties a leaseholder has in the UK is however one of the difficulties to be resolved in this regard, as there is currently no way of searching the Land Registry to obtain a list of properties owned by one individual. The guidance appears to rely on the leaseholder completing the leaseholder deed of certificate being open and honest in this regard, and that deed of certificate being passed onto subsequent owners. Making false representations or failing to disclose required information in the deed of certificate may be a criminal offence, although reliance on this to discourage mis-reporting is clearly less satisfactory than having a searchable register.

IR35 is an anti-tax avoidance regime which is intended to tackle (in HMRC’s view) the long standing issue of individual contractors providing their services or labour via an intermediary – which is usually a personal service company (referred to as a PSC). We’ll talk about PSCs here, but there are other types of intermediaries that are caught.

HMRC’s view is that this arrangement is often considered to be disguised employment and therefore a tax-avoidance arrangement.

So IR35 is essentially a test of employment status – and if, once you apply the test, the contractor should be an employee, they should then be taxed as an employee.

Individual contractors who are not operating via an intermediary (eg sole traders) do not need to be assessed under IR35. However, you will always have the risk with those individuals that there is no intermediary – therefore if their tax status is wrong, HMRC are very likely to consider that responsibility for this would fall on the hiring company in any event.

Many businesses that supply directly to consumers have been concerned to understand their legal position in relation to services that have been cancelled, or that they have been unable to perform, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and in particular how to deal with deposits paid by consumers for such services. With some degree of restriction on the hospitality and tourism sectors likely to remain in place for some time, such questions will remain important for the foreseeable future.