New sick leave rules affect you. The European Court of Justice has decided that statutory entitlement to paid annual leave will continue during long-term sick leave.
A Federation of Small Businesses (FSM) poll indicated that only 19% of businesses say this will make no difference to the way they employ staff whereas 38% of businesses like yours will be more cautious about taking on new staff with health problems, 21% will be less likely to take on new staff, 19% will consider removing their company sick pay policy and just pay the statutory minimum and 17% will be more likely to dismiss staff on long-term sick leave, but even there the ruling provides that payments in lieu of leave upon termination of employment must include any untaken statutory annual leave even if the employee has been on sick leave for the whole of the leave year.
The same ruling states that workers can now choose to take any missed annual leave at a later date if they were sick during a period of annual leave. That will clearly have a negative affect on your business as well.
“It is well known that small firms are the country’s key employers and have done all they can to retain their employees and take on new staff throughout the recession,” said John Walker, the Federation of Small Businesses National Chairman.
“However, measures put in place by the European Court of Justice on sick leave are hampering small businesses’ ability to do the job at hand and help tackle unemployment – which is at its highest for 17 years.
“Small businesses understand the need for good health in the workplace and are like a family, knowing and understanding the needs of their staff.
“But these FSB-ICM figures show that the changes in the law on sick leave are hampering employment opportunities to get long-term unemployed back into work.
“The European Commission must look at the measures on sick leave while reviewing the Working Time Directive and ensure these are rewritten so that sick leave is actually classed as sick leave so that small firms have the best conditions to take on more staff and help pull the economy back onto the road to recovery”
CHECK YOUR PAYSLIPS!
In order to ensure employees pay the right amount of tax and National Insurance, at the right time, HMRC introduced the biggest change to PAYE processing in 25 years with the introduction of a new system for processing PAYE, the National Insurance and PAYE Service (NPS), which has one single record for each individual customer containing all their PAYE details. It’s all to do with employees only having to make a single phone call for any queries they may have. The system implementation started in June last year with planned upgrades in November and, now, April this year.
HMRC have issued advice of various problems in tax code migrations, including such areas as allowances or underpayments carried forward from previous years but have now warned of some employees being on the wrong tax code.
Employees are advised to check their April payslips because it’s possible that they may have been advised of a different tax code to the (supposedly duplicate) one sent to their employer for the “correct” deduction of tax at source!
Employees are warned to look out for any unexpected a changes to the amount they are paid and to phone HMRC is they believe there is a problem.
