Employment Newsletter for Individuals

COVID & Furlough Scheme

March 2020 saw us enter the first lockdown due to Coronavirus with many businesses having to close and make decisions to furlough their staff to save their business in the long term and ensure their staff received payment from the Government furlough scheme.

Many businesses had to review their business needs for the longer term and make difficult decisions, which included redundancies. This resulted in individuals requiring a specialist employment lawyer to review their Settlement Agreement. Many people did not know what a Settlement Agreement was and what the process is for accepting/rejecting a Settlement Agreement from their employer.

With COVID-19 continuing to affect our lives and businesses and with the current furlough scheme due to end at the end of April this year, it is unfortunate but likely to continue to affect employers and employees.

At Kerseys Solicitors, we want to make the process of finalising a Settlement Agreement for you as simple and straight forward as possible, we achieve this by booking a virtual or telephone with our Employment Solicitor, prior to the meeting we ask you to arrange to email us your draft Settlement Agreement along with evidence of your identity.

We review your documents prior to the virtual/telephone meeting to enable to advise you on the restrictions and benefits and to ensure that you are also safeguarded for your future taking into account pensions and other such items like Christmas clubs etc.

If you are happy with the points in your Settlement Agreement, we arrange for you to sign the document and email or post it to us and then finalise the Settlement Agreement with your employer. In most circumstances the Settlement Agreement will have a clause that your employer will pay a certain amount of fees to cover the cost of your Employment advice. We will then invoice your employer direct and send the agreed signed Settlement Agreement to your employer.

6 April 2021, new legislation will amend the current formula for PENP to avoid unfair outcomes if an employee’s pay period is defined in months but their contractual notice period is expressed in weeks. The changes will apply to those individuals who have their employment terminated and where the termination payment is received on or after 6 April 2021.

April 2021 – IR35 changes in the private

This was meant to happen in April 2020, but was delayed by a year.

The upcoming IR35 changes mean that:

• medium-sized and large businesses will be responsible for working out the contractor’s employment status, not the contractor
• contractors should be given the reasons behind the decision, and can dispute the decision if they disagree with it
• small businesses are exempt from the changes – so if the contractor works for a small client, the contractor will still be responsible for working out their employment status

End clients are classed as small businesses if they meet two of the following criteria:

• annual turnover of no more than £10.2 million
• balance sheet total of no more than £5.1 million
• no more than 50 employees

Businesses and contractors should start preparing for the 2021 IR35 changes as soon as possible.

30 April 2021

Interim provision in the EU-UK trade and co-operation agreement for transmission of personal data to the UK ends