Understand Your Rights. Solve Your Legal Problems
Hazel Wright, certified family mediator and Partner at leading Lincoln’s Inn law firm Hunters incorporating May, May & Merrimans.
(Source: Hunters)
Autumn usually heralds a flurry of new employment legislation and 2016 is proving to be no different. The most immediate change that employers had to get to grips with was the increase in the National Minimum Wage (NMW) rates that was introduced on 1st October. The government has accepted the Low Pay Commission’s recommendation that the NMW should be increased, but in a change from past increases, the new rates will only remain in force for six months instead of the usual twelve. The reason for this change to the calendar is to bring the NMW increases in line with the proposed increase in the National Living Wage (NLW). As employers will recall, NLW came into force in April 2016 amidst much controversy. NLW only affects employees over the age of 25. The increase in NMW will not affect employees earning NLW.
With the introduction of the NLW, the NMW increase (whilst expected by employers) represents another forced pay rise that employers will have to fund during 2016. With the effect of NLW now starting to bite, many small businesses are reporting that they are being placed in a state of ‘financial distress’ because of the increase in overheads caused by growing staff costs. This situation is only likely to get worse given stated aim of the former Chancellor, George Osborne, for the government to increase NLW to £9 by 2020.
In addition, following the outcome of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, whilst no-one can say with any certainty what ‘Brexit’ will look like, it remains to be seen whether smaller employers can absorb these increased wage costs in the long term.
The risk to employers who do not pay NMW is of course greater since April 2016 when the penalties for paying below NMW increased from 100% to 200% of the money owed to the employee. Furthermore, in an effort to promote compliance the government is also now publishing lists of those employers who have been found to be paying below NMW.
There was however some respite for employers with the announcement of a delay in the implementation of the draft Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2016. These regulations have received much publicity in recent months as the government seeks to redress the imbalance in gender equality by making it mandatory for companies to publish details of the difference between their male and female employees’ pay. A report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission estimates that in the UK there is a gender pay gap of 20%, with women earning on average 80p for every £1.00 earned by a man. The hope is that by fostering more transparency, the new regulations will incentivise employers to take proactive steps to promote fairness between the genders and identify inequality.
Not to be confused with equal pay or discrimination, the gender pay gap looks at the differences in average pay between the genders in an organisation over a period of time, irrespective of whether they do ‘like work’. The regulations will require employers to provide information not just about salary gaps but about bonus gaps as well.
The regulations requiring employers to publish their gender pay information are now expected to come into force in early 2017 for private and voluntary sector employers with over 250 employees. Employers will be required to look at the mean and median figures for pay in their organisations, which includes bonuses etc. Employers who are subject to these regulations will then be required to publish details of their gender pay gap by uploading that information to the government’s website.
Although not a mandatory requirement, there will be an option for employers to supply a written narrative to explain the information they disclose. It is anticipated that many employers will take advantage of this facility to place their information in context. Not all employers are the same, and there is a fear that simply publishing raw data without providing a commentary (particularly in respect of an adverse report) could lead to significant reputational damage. There may be a legitimate reason why there is disparity between male and female wages, so it is only appropriate that the employer at least has an opportunity to put forward an explanation.
The first reports are not due to be published until 2018 and will be required every year thereafter. Given the increased administrative burden that will be placed on those who are required to comply with these new reporting obligations, employers are advised to start looking at the processes they need to put in place now to ensure that the correct data is collated. As the information due to be published in 2018 relates to pay differences in the preceding year, information will need to be gathered from April 2017, and in some cases even earlier. It is important that employers have the necessary tools to cope with this requirement.
Preparing the gender pay gap information at the last minute may comply with the reporting obligations, but it will not achieve the purpose of the regulations – namely to identify any pay gaps and incentivise the employer to do something about it. Employers who are required to report in 2018 should already be applying the principles of the regulations to their organisations to identify any significant pay gap. This will give them time to address any inequality before they are required formally to upload their information to the government’s website.
At present there is no specific sanction contained within the regulations for employers who fail to publish their information. There has been some debate as to whether the regulations can work if there is no viable sanction for non-compliance. However, one view is that a simple fine would not work because larger employers may take the view that it is cheaper to pay the fine rather than increase remuneration. This is not what the government wants to achieve.
There is however a financial incentive for compliance that employers should consider, namely the potential for Employment Tribunal claims if the information gathered points to a substantial gender pay gap between the sexes. The first reports from larger organisations will undoubtedly be reviewed with interest by employees, and those who feel that they are being underpaid as a result of the gender pay gap may decide to seek redress via legal action.
It is also highly likely that employers who have a large gender pay gap will be at risk of public “naming and shaming” which could have a significant impact on business. As with much new legislation, action groups will probably be looking to make an example of those household names which disclose a significant gender pay gap and have taken no steps to redress the imbalance. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that we will see famous brands being boycotted because their gender pay gap reports reveal that they do not have an inclusive culture.
Paul Kelly, Employment Solicitor at Blacks Solicitors
(Source: Blacks Solicitors LLP)
Technology is an ever moving target. It’s one of the most demanding working environments; every few weeks or months you need to understand and account for new technologies changing the nature of IT.
However, the benefits of being in a fast-paced environment are that new opportunities to combine methods or technology occur almost daily. One such combination is Narrow Artificial Intelligence (ML) for contract detection and analytics, brought together with the ‘underlying idea’ of smart contracts, or the encoding and execution of contractual data and events on a programmable blockchain.
Smart contracts may not fully deliver on all that is promised. Smart contracts face several technical limitations and challenges. The usefulness of the data or functions encoded, and how it gets accurately encoded onto the smart contract are often questioned.
What this does not mean is that the underlying idea behind smart contracts should be dismissed. There are multiple approaches to the creation of smart contracts to overcome the challenges, including combining Narrow Artificial Intelligence for the detection and extraction of information held within physical contracts, and once extracted, encoding this data onto a blockchain.
Intelligent Contracts
This approach is far more intelligent and extensible than smart contracts as they are currently defined, and as such, are called Intelligent Contracts. The intelligence comes from the ‘I’ in AI, where a system is taught to continually and consistently recognise and extract key information from contracts, with active learning based on users’ responses, both positive and negative, to the extractions and predictions made. This is very different to current smart contracts, but it still uses some of the underlying methods of blockchain and the extension to store immutable information or actionable events within a block.
The Value of Intelligent Contracts
To help demonstrate the value of intelligent contracts, let’s take a sample customer, a large international IT / Software company that has acquired different companies or business units over many years. They have over 16 different contracting solutions on both the buy and sell sides of their business, with no standard reporting on contracts. They continually sign Master Agreements in different locations or departments, and should allow all global entities access to discounts once negotiated levels are reached or exceeded. This is a very common challenge with larger organisations.
You can immediately see where a ‘smart contract’ could be used to encode the master agreement’s key performance indicators (KPIs) onto a blockchain, and then automatically apply the discounts across all departments. However, with all the different systems, and no single or consistent method to track and report on new contracts being created, signed, or agreed to on (potentially) 3rd party paper, extracting the required information can be a challenge
Blockchain: The Single Source of the Truth
If we take this further, past just the encoding of actions, and the combination of parties and events, we can see how this solution provides companies with a ‘single source of the truth’ within contracts. As a contract placed onto the blockchain has been agreed by both parties, why not share the same information between parties – as a single entity with continually updated contract terms?
Companies placing details of actual contracts onto a public blockchain might soon run into issues of security and scalability. Security because every person on the blockchain can see the transactions that occurred, and scalability as block size is limited on public blockchains for many reasons, not least of which is performance. With blockchain, the larger the blocks the longer it takes, and the more processing power is needed to reach consensus (e.g. the process used by a group of peers responsible for maintaining a distributed ledger to reach agreement on the ledger’s contents.) To this end, it should be clear that a public blockchain or smart contracts system are unlikely to meet the requirements of many organisations for contracts.
Intelligent contracts use private blockchains with algorithms to ensure no single system controls the creation of the blocks, leading to immutable and distributed consensus. As the chains are private, the issue with sizes of blocks is removed, and security can be implemented at many different layers, including HASH-only and PKI key-level security for access to information encoded on the blockchain. The use of the private blockchain also allows for the system to provide Know Your Customer (KYC) functions, as each entity within the system would be required to be known as they are a party to, or have an interest in a contract. They can all participate in the creation of the blocks as each entity is known and trusted.
With the differences outlined above, it’s clear to see why intelligent contracts are what enterprise customers need.
Intelligent Contracts: The User Experience
One of the most important aspects of technology is to make users’ daily lives simpler, and the operation and adoption of new technology as seamless as possible. One of the best ways I have found to do this, over years of working with enterprise customers, is to embed new functions into well-known existing applications or processes so users are actually unaware of the new processes and functions taking place behind the scenes.
Who Needs Intelligent Contracts?
In the example above, I described a large Software/IT company with many different contract repositories and processes across their business functions and lines of businesses.
But there are many other types of user cases for intelligent contracts, where the capabilities of this new technology will provide significant value over what is currently available. These include M&A and business restructuring, contract Lifecycle management (CLM), and regulatory compliance.
Intelligent Contracts in M&A
When ownership of an organisation changes, the contracts associated with that business are divested or acquired within those transactions, and can greatly affect the accretive nature or overall outcome of the transaction. In M&A, organisations need to review contracts and analyse their metadata in the due diligence phase, to ensure they know what they are buying, and then integrate contracts into the new organisation post transaction. With divestitures, they need to know which entities to assign the appropriate contracts.
With intelligent contracts, organisations will be able to immediately locate all relevant contracts as they will be located in one repository. All the metadata will be associated as blocks on the relevant chains, and so full reviews will be fast and simple, in due diligence and post transaction. For example, special indemnifications and assignment and termination rules will be identified immediately across the entire portfolio, and will be relevant to valuation. The current deal room, where limited subsets of contract documents are placed for manual reviews across multiple legal professionals will no longer be needed. The deep analytics embedded in Intelligent contracts will mean that M&A and legal pros can immediately, and visually, capture all types of metrics and analytics across entire contract portfolios.
Contract Lifecycle Management
A challenge often found with contract lifecycle management is system ROI which has been illusive for most customers. The systems are heavy in workflow and document library services, and are very light in contract data management. They have proven to be overly complex, tough to implement, and suffer from low adoption rates and usage with knowledge workers. They also have poor change management functionality, and the data management is primarily manual input of contract data by users, which is inconsistent and error prone.
Intelligent contracts will be authored in the familiar Word user interface, and collaboration and negotiation is facilitated via workflow in the blockchain. Contract data is captured and shared automatically on the chain, and there is never any question or confusion as to which versions and edits are being used and approved, and why. Changes can be initiated and processed in the LOBs via Word using approved language, meaning Legal Ops resources are used more efficiently and cost effectively. The result is a lean, efficient, secure, and scalable contracting system that finally delivers the ROI desired for contract automation.
Regulatory Compliance
The final user case is in regulatory compliance. With intelligent contracts, when a regulation changes, all contract data is automatically captured and presented visually, so organisations understand the size and nature of the impact of the new regulation to their business. Compliance owners can determine strategies and project plans to meet compliance deadlines.
When contract repapering or renegotiation is needed to achieve compliance, the business owner can initiate the process in MS Word and using approved language, make the needed changes. Those changes are captured on the blockchain, and then can be routed to legal ops for final approval. This is more efficient than using legal ops resources throughout the entire process. The blockchain is available to all relevant parties, so contract changes are permanent, transparent, and auditable.
Toby Hannon, Vice President of Seal Software, EMEA
(Source: Seal Software)
Leading software provider, Advanced, is experiencing increasing demand for the latest version of its award-winning solution, Laserform Hub, which includes the addition of combined SDLT and Land Registry submissions.
Laserform Hub was developed to enable law firms to meet the Government’s ‘digital by default’ strategy by allowing secure electronic form submission to multiple government portals from a single location.
One hundred law firms, ranging from solo practitioners to Top 200 firms, have now signed up to the Hub, with over half of those already fully operational. Advanced launched the new combined gateway in April after working closely with the Land Registry for several months.
The new gateway simplifies the process for law firms that complete commercial and residential filing, providing them with a simple online process for submitting SDLT and AP1 forms. Features include automatic pre-population of forms and support for supervision to monitor teams and ensure deadlines are not missed.
James Rippin, Business Gateway Product Manager at Land Registry, comments, “We’ve had a very positive relationship with Advanced for a number of years now and they really understand the needs of the legal market.
“As well as simplifying the submission process and reducing risk for law firms, the new gateway will benefit Land Registry by increasing the number of digital applications we receive. We want customers to interact with us digitally because it’s more efficient, and the built-in checks in Laserform Hub result in greater accuracy and time savings.”
The new gateway was developed in an agile way, starting with a basic application which was then built out and tailored based on feedback from early adopters. As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, there are no installation costs or overheads for customers, who have 24/7 access to the system.
Graham Sweeney, Operations Director at Schofield Sweeney, a law firm using Laserform Hub says, “Innovation is important for our practice; being involved early in the development of Laserform Hub has given us the opportunity to feed into the finished application.
“We have been using the solution for Companies House mortgage filing, and recently adding SDLT and Land Registry submissions to the platform means we can submit all of these forms from one application. The cloud-based application is quick, easy to use and more cost effective.”
To find out more about Advanced’s Laserform Hub, visit www.laserformhub.legal.
(Source: Advance)
Business women who want to get ahead in male dominated industries such as the financial and private equity sectors need to improve their self-confidence and negotiating skills, Georgina Squire, head of dispute resolution at Rosling King LLP says.
Speaking at the BVCA Summit in London, Squire discussed the challenges facing women in business with Claudine Collins, the UK managing director of advertising agency MediaCom.
Collins, one of Lord Sugar’s most trusted confidantes and winner of Media's Most Inspiring Women in the industry, has been an advocate for diversity in the workplace for many years.
One of the highlights of the discussion included a point taken from The Glass Wall book by Sue Unerman and Kathryn Jacob. A glass wall, as opposed to a glass ceiling, represents an obstacle for women who are left out of office conversations, which are taken to the pub or the golf course by their male peers.
This boys’ club culture can exclude women from career enhancing opportunities, but can be overcome if women are proactive. By consciously requesting time with their superiors for lunch or a drink, business women can create a situation where more informal conversation can be had and where they can showcase their achievements at work.
Another issue that women need to tackle is a tendency, out of modesty, to talk themselves out of a job. Said Collins: “Very often, women will not apply for jobs unless they believe they are 100% qualified to do it, whilst men often don’t think that way.”
Similarly, women are much more reticent about putting themselves forward for promotion or asking for a salary increase. Collins continued: “We women need to stop focussing on our weaknesses and spend our energies on improving them. We need to start focussing at what we are brilliant at and we need to sell our qualities.”
Attracting the best female talent has long been a challenge for companies aiming to balance the gender gap. A report from the Government Equalities Office states that bringing the balance of women’s productivity and employment to the same level as men could add £600 billion to the UK economy, whilst equalising participation rates could add 10% to the UK economy by 2030.
Despite the fact that the number of women in leadership roles in FTSE 100 firms has more than doubled over the last five years, according to FN's Sixth Annual Women in Finance Survey, there are still only 26% of women at board level, so there is still a notable gender imbalance in the financial services sector.
Private equity is one of those areas where this imbalance is most apparent with 40% of companies having no female executive committee members at all.
Georgina Squire concluded: “Women represent 50% of the human race and it is fundamental that their input in the financial sectors, particularly in private equity, is not lost. In a world where we have a female UK prime minister, and a female US presidential candidate, it is great to see that barriers are starting to be broken down and the contribution that women can make is being recognised in male dominated sectors, including Private Equity.”
(Source: Rosling King LLP)
When workers are injured on the job, they are entitled to submit a compensation claim that covers the costs of their medical treatment. However, as many lawyers know too well, sometimes the nature of injuries or the behavior of employers warrants additional action beyond the fulfillment of the compensation claim.
Though compensation is mandated by federal and state law, disagreements over workplace injuries can take months or years to resolve. Unfortunately, the more time a case takes to reach a conclusion, the more money is lost in the shuffle.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, businesses in the United States lose an estimated $250 billion every year to on-the-job injuries, and for most employers, the cost of such suits is enough to put them well in the red. Some states are instituting new efforts to invigorate businesses burdened by high numbers of workplace injuries ― but the best way businesses can avoid closing shop due to workplace injuries is to act quickly and efficiently as soon as an accident occurs.
The amount lost by U.S. businesses ― $250 billion ― may seem extravagant, but that great sum isn’t handed out to every worker who sustains an injury at work. That figure is divided amongst millions of American workers.
In fact, there are more than 8.5 million workplace injuries sustained every year in the United States, which amounts to more than 23,000 per day; worse, work-related fatalities add up to more than 52,000, meaning more than 142 people die every day thanks to their work.
Workers’ compensation is responsible for a sizeable chunk of the $250 billion lost to injuries. Workers who accept workplace injury compensation ― which usually include wage replacement as well as medical benefits ― are typically forbidden from filing a lawsuit against their employers. Comp insurance isn’t cheap, but most employers opt in because the compensation bargain prevents them from becoming insolvent due to high damage rewards.
However, lawsuits do happen, and they tend to be distressingly expensive for employers. Lawsuits, which are typically filed as personal injury claims, are entitled to seek recovery of all damages sustained, to include lost earnings, lost earning capacity, medical bills past and future, and permanent impairment.
Additionally, workers who accept workers’ comp are not entitled to benefits for pain and suffering or loss of enjoyment of life, but lawsuits that settle in workers’ favor usually include remunerations for such damages, which are difficult to quantify and typically cost exorbitant amounts in settlements or trial cases.
Finally, businesses suffer due to a loss in productivity after workplace accidents. Recovering workers cannot perform at the same capacity as before their injuries; in fact, most are absent for a number of workdays, and the diminished workforce can be more impairing to businesses than the injured worker’s costs of compensation.
According to a study at Cornell University, the loss of productivity from one absent employee amounted to at least 1.3 times his or her wages, and that number compounds for every day the worker cannot return. With lessened teams as well as potential personal injury lawsuits, employers with injured workers have plenty of costs to worry about.
Fortunately, businesses are more than capable of reducing their risk of employee injury and therefore avoiding much of these exorbitant costs altogether. The first step is always employee education: With regular safety training ― and appropriate licensing or certification as necessary ― employees should recognize potentially dangerous situations and act accordingly.
However, accidents do happen, and businesses should prepare employees with the proper procedures to avoid unnecessary damage and costly lawsuits. For example, employees must know to immediately report any injuries to supervisors, ideally in writing. They should be encouraged to seek medical attention, ideally from a doctor affiliated with the employer’s insurance carrier.
Those businesses that care little for their employees’ welfare will certainly pay for their malfeasance. Injured and wronged workers should certainly seek local, experienced legal counsel. An injury lawyer in San Antonio will work tirelessly to protect the rights of fellow San Antonians to keep the city healthy and productive, and the same can be said of most injury lawyers in all cities.
Because of the outrageous costs of workplace injuries, a number of governments are working to help businesses survive compensation and lawsuits while protecting employee welfare.
One solution comes from Argentina, where businesses spend almost 20 percent of their earnings on insurance. If passed, the Argentine bill will prevent lawyers and investigators from pocketing employees’ compensation benefits, reducing the outgoing expenses of businesses.
Alternatively, New York aims to offer regional businesses $5 million in grants to help them create working conditions that facilitate safety and reduce likelihood of injury. Only time will tell whether state interference will help businesses or workers in the case of workplace injury.
Recently the UK’s new Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham who took over in July 2016, published the £400,000 Monetary Penalty Notice issued to TalkTalk on 30 September 2016. This Notice detailed her reasons for imposing the highest ever UK fine for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act 1998. Denham was pretty scathing – “Yes hacking is wrong, but that is not an excuse for companies to abdicate their security obligations. TalkTalk should and could have done more to safeguard its customer information. It did not and we have taken action.”
Paul Motion, partner and head of the Data Protection Defence Team at leading independent Scottish law firm BTO Solicitors, commented: “The fine of course relates to TalkTalk’s much publicised data hack on 21 October 2015. TalkTalk has said it found the fine disappointing as it had co-operated fully with the ICO investigation. But the telecoms giant shouldn’t really have been surprised. TalkTalk bought Tiscali in 2009. It appears TalkTalk did not know Tiscali’s infrastructure included old web pages that were still available on line, which gave access to a database containing the names of 156,959 customers and bank details for 15,656 people. TalkTalk also did not know the database software was out of date and had not been patched regularly to address vulnerabilities. The same SQL attack that was carried out successfully on 21st October 2015 had also taken place on the same webpages in July and September 2015. The £400k fine was mainly for a serious breach of the seventh Data Protection Principle – failing to have appropriate technical and organisational measures in place to secure data – but also for a breach of the fifth Principle, which outlaws keeping personal data for longer than necessary.
“The ICO said the Talk Talk data breach was likely to cause “substantial distress” to those whose names, addresses and bank details were stolen. The ICO indicated that these details could be used for fraudulent purposes and that even the possibility of fraud happening would be distressing. Further if the data was misused or disclosed to an untrustworthy third party this would cause further distress exposing the individuals to blagging and possible fraud. The emphasis of ‘distress’ in relation to this particular breach is interesting given bank details were stolen and one might have expected discussion of the consequences. Be that as it may, distress matters because a recent court case (Vidal Hall –v- Google) held that only distress rather than financial damage was needed to open up a claim against a data controller for compensation under the Data Protection Act (DPA) and for the time being this ruling stands.”
Up until now, the highest fine the ICO had imposed was on an NHS Trust. Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust was fined £325,000 after hard drives from its computers which contained the highly sensitive personal data of tens of thousands of patients and staff were found for sale on the internet.
Paul continued: “One thing that is particularly striking about the TalkTalk fine is that a fine of this size has been imposed on a private sector organisation. The outgoing Information Commissioner appeared to believe that private sector organisations were somehow better at data protection than the public sector. He is on record in the “Independent” of 23rd February 2014[1] describing local government organisations as “hopeless” in their handling of personal data, a view he then repeated at the ICO’s conference in Manchester two weeks later. If the TalkTalk fine indicates that the new ICO is rowing back from that position, it is a welcome development which may reassure those data protection commentators who were becoming concerned that undue regulatory attention seemed to be directed towards only public sector data protection breaches (though ironically it might be noted that the private sector has been hammered by the same regulator, in relation to cold calling, which is not covered by the DPA but by the PECR regulations).
“Once the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into direct effect in May 2018 (which it will, Brexit or not, in this author’s view), organisations will be obliged to report serious breaches and it may be that we then see a true reflection of just how secure organisations are across both sectors. However, be warned, the new Data Protection Regulation will also introduce higher maximum fines of up €20,000,000 or 4% of global turnover. If the GDPR had been in force today, TalkTalk could have faced a fine of £35million. Those who feel fines of that size are unlikely might draw an analogy with Aviva UK Life, which was fined £8.2 million this week by the Financial Conduct Authority. Aviva’s fine was because it had failed to ensure that it had adequate controls and oversight arrangements to effectively control the outsourced administration of client money.
“Fines of this size, and more importantly avoiding them, may encourage Board Members to put data management much higher up on the boardroom agenda. The reference to data management is deliberate. Whilst security is an important factor, an holistic approach is needed. Whilst good data security is important, the ICO also expects to see good management and has repeatedly emphasised that staff training will be taken into account in judging the adequacy of organisational measures required by the DPA 1998.”
(Source: BTO Solicitors LLP)
National land management charity, the Land Trust has responded to the Communities and Local Government Committee's inquiry into the future of public parks, urging Government to move beyond questioning the need for public parks and to recognize the value these spaces provide to the health and vitality of society and implement policy to support them.
Public parks are under severe threat. There is currently no legal obligation to fund and maintain public parks, so financial pressures on councils are resulting in cuts to parks maintenance budgets. Parks are used by so many people across society for a wide variety of reasons, delivering considerable benefits But the consequence of not having free and easy access to well-maintained public spaces could be detrimental, affecting all aspects of society, such as public health and wellbeing, increased long-term economic costs and social breakdown.
The recent Heritage Lottery Fund’s 2016 State of UK Public Parks report backs this up, demonstrating that parks are used regularly by over 37 million people each year, and good quality parks are helping to tackle many of society’s greatest challenges, from childhood obesity to a changing climate.
In its response, the Land Trust demonstrates that:
As such the Land Trust wants Government to:
Euan Hall, Chief Executive of the Land Trust said "We need to acknowledge the vital roles that parks and public green spaces play within communities. By establishing the policies and sustainable investment models for the long-term management of these spaces, our economy and public health and wellbeing will benefit, whilst pressures across multiple public services will ease. However, this needs central and local Government support, to put the structures and funding in place.”
(Source: the Land Trust)
Workplace experts, Acas, have launched a new guide to help employers manage staff who have a potentially life threatening or long term illness such as cancer, HIV or multiple sclerosis.
It is estimated that by 2020 almost one in two people (47%) will get cancer at some point in their lives but some employers may be ill equipped to deal with staff who have the condition and unfamiliar with the law.
Acas advises employers and small businesses to have regular discussions with employees who have a progressive illness and to make reasonable adjustments to their jobs if necessary.
Acas Head of Guidance, Stewart Gee, said: “Being diagnosed with a potentially life threatening illness such as cancer can be a devastating experience for a worker and a manager may worry about how they can provide the best possible support.
“Many employers may not be aware that as soon as anyone gets diagnosed as having cancer, HIV or multiple sclerosis then they have the same protection as someone with a disability according to the law, and are automatically protected against discrimination under the Equality Act.
“Our guidance published today offers advice to bosses on how best to provide support to team members and employees who have a potentially life threatening or long term illness as well as staying within the law.”
Acas’ top tips for managers on handling potentially life threatening illnesses at work include:
Acas’ full guidance is available at www.acas.org.uk/progressiveillness
(Source: Acas - Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service)
More than two thirds (70%) of the UK’s SME business owners are confident that the UK's decision to leave the EU will have no impact on their ability to access finance. This is according to the Close Brothers Business Barometer, a quarterly survey of UK SME owners and senior management across a range of sectors and regions.
Only in Greater London did over half of businesses (57%) answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘do you expect your access to finance to be impacted by Brexit?’. In contrast, in Northern Ireland and Wales, only 14% and 18% of business owners, respectively, answered ‘yes’.
“Overall, UK SMEs feel that despite the outcome of the EU referendum, their access to finance has not been noticeably disrupted, and nor do they expect it to be,” said Neil Davies, CEO, Close Brothers Asset Finance.
“Apart from Greater London businesses, all other regions feel that Brexit will have a limited impact on their ability to raise finance.
“We have consistently said that despite the outcome, it’s very much ‘business as usual’ and that we will continue to provide our customers with funding, as we’ve historically done through all economic cycles and periods of uncertainty. We even took out a full-page advert in the Sunday Times on 10 July saying exactly that.”
Sectors
There was a degree of variation within Close Brothers Asset Finance’s key sectors, with some expecting to see more of an impact than others. The breakdown of ‘yes’ responses to the question ‘do you expect your access to finance to be impacted by Brexit?’:
(Source: Close Brothers Asset Finance)
