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Employment

The Government has announced that the National Living Wage and the National Minimum Wage (NMW) rates will increase from 1 April 2023. The rates will increase as follows:

There are a number of Bills proposed to come into force in 2023 which, if enacted in their currently proposed format, would have a significant impact on employment law. These include:

  • The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022-23

Currently at the committee stage in the House of Lords, this Bill seeks to ‘sunset’ all retained EU law by the end of 2023, unless restated or replaced into UK domestic law (click to see our previous article).

Full-time workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid holiday under the Working Time Regulations 1998 (“WTR”). However, calculating what constitutes a weeks’ pay can be difficult where workers work variable hours or have variable elements of pay such as commission or overtime pay. This has been the subject of a series of litigation over the last decade, with the two most recent case were heard by the Supreme Court in 2022.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Following the UK’s exit from the European Union, the post-Brexit European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 incorporated former EU law into UK law as ‘retained EU law’. Essentially, retained EU law was captured at the point of Brexit and forms part of our legal framework. Retained EU law touches many areas of law, including employment, data protection and environmental law. On 22 September 2022, the government introduced the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which would amend the existing position in relation to retained EU law as follows:

Statements of fitness for work, also known as ‘fit’ notes, were introduced by the Social Security (Medical Evidence) Regulations and Statutory Sick Pay (Medical Evidence) (Amendment) Regulations 2010.

Fit notes are often used for:

The ICO has published updated guidance in relation to data protection now that covid-19 measures are relaxing across the UK. The guidance does not put in place new or additional rules, but it is a useful prompt for companies to check over their data protection policies and procedures, especially where these were altered to cope with the changes brought about by the covid-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to various amendments to the Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) regime, which no longer apply after 25 March 2022. Such amendments were relevant to the definition of incapacity; payment of SSP; requirement for evidence; and recovery of SSP payments.

Since March 2020, various amendments have been made to Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. These amendments are relevant to the:-

  • Definition of incapacity;
  • Payment of SSP;
  • Requirement for evidence; and
  • Recovery of SSP payments.

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