Top Fortnightly Facts - 13th October 2022

What?

In her conference speech, Prime Minister Liz Truss confirmed that deregulating certain aspects of retained EU law would be a priority of hers.  As part of this, the Government has announced that businesses with fewer than 500 employees will be exempt from ‘reporting requirements and other regulations’ in an attempt to cut red-tape and to help boost productivity and growth of UK businesses.  The full scope of this announcement is yet to be clarified; however it is thought that this may be limited to reporting requirements around gender pay gap reporting and executive pay ratios.  Previously, these reporting requirements applied to businesses with more than 250 employees.  However, the Government has suggested that further future changes could be implemented to increase the threshold to 1,000 employees. 

So what?

Many employers will welcome this change which should help free up more time to spend developing and growing businesses.  However, it will also be important to ensure that the rights that these reporting requirements were introduced to protect do not fall by the wayside.  For example, gender pay gap reporting was introduced to assist in highlighting and narrowing/eliminating pay differences between men and women.  It is therefore unclear how this issue will now be dealt with. 

What?

A further proposal floated by Business Secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, (according to the Financial Times) is the dilution of employment rights for certain individuals.  These proposals are quoted to include:

• introducing “no-fault” dismissals for higher earners (so employees earning over £50,000 or £100,000) which could see employment rights for such individuals removed or largely reduced;
• removing current rights that enable agency workers to become permanent employees; and
• repealing the Working Time Regulations, which could see various changes including to holiday pay calculations and the 48-hour working week. The result of this change could see more simplified methods for dealing with holiday pay (which will no doubt provide a sigh of relief) and also see the removal of restrictions on maximum working hours meaning that workers no longer need to opt out of this cap. 

So what?

The proposals have yet to be fully considered and so it will be interesting to see if they get much traction.  However, if they do get real consideration they could substantially change employment law as we know it. 

What?

World Mental Health Day took place on 10 October 2022 and aims to raise awareness of mental health issues globally. 

So what?

Why is this topic so important for employers?  Well for a number of reasons including:

• compliance with employer duties to protect the health and wellbeing of workers and to comply with disability discrimination laws;
• to ensure a good working relationship with staff; and
• to ensure that there is a supportive working environment which should ultimately result in the business performing well.

What can employers do to tackle mental health issues in the workplace? Employers should ensure they are:

• implementing appropriate policies such as mental health or wellbeing policies and equality policies;
• providing training to staff to promote and safeguard workers’ mental health and providing training to managers to help them better identify concerns or issues at an earlier date. This should help support workers and also help minimise levels of long-term sickness absence; and
• considering the implementation of initiatives to support mental health in the workplace, for example creating an open and trusted environment to discuss health issues, training mental health first aiders and providing employee counselling.

World Mental Health Day provides an opportunity for employers to review this area and their current plans.  However, employers would be well advised to keep mental health high on their priority list year-round.