2020 highlights

What an unusual and difficult year 2020 has been for everyone. We’ve reached the end of our 5th year in business and we’re hopeful that 2021 will be much better for our friends, family and our valued clients as the vaccination programme gets into full swing.

We’ve been busy, as usual, supporting businesses and individuals as they navigate their way through UK employment law but with the added complication of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite all the challenges, we’ve maintained our excellent independent rankings in the UK’s leading legal directory, the UK Legal 500, our top ranking as ‘ThreeBestRated’ for employment law in Newport and we continue to consistently rank in the top 3 in Google Voice Searches for the top employment lawyers in Newport.

Since our launch, we’ve made employment law work for 326 clients across England and Wales as well as one in France (whom we enjoyed advising in French) and one in the British Virgin Islands.

2,573 followers on Twitter

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We continue to put our clients at the heart of everything we do. We love to get great feedback and have been delighted with the kindness we’ve received from so many.

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We’ve successfully represented clients in a large number of Employment Tribunal claims and have advised across a wide range of matters including:

Employer clients:

• advising employers on protective measures against executives in breach of restrictive covenants;

• defending multiple employers from claims of unfair/constructive/wrongful dismissal, discrimination, health & safety/whistleblowing detriment and breach of contract;

• drafting and negotiating employment contracts;

• advising a political party on employment issues relating to one of their candidates;

• advising employers on issues arising from their refusal of flexible working requests;

• conducting grievance investigations into bullying/sexual harassement on behalf of law firms;

• drafting appropriate HR policies and procedures for multiple businesses;

• advising on complex whistleblowing matters;

• advising on the employment aspects of mergers, acquisitions, outsourcings, relocations and restructurings.

Employee clients:

• advising on multiple settlement agreements, from quick advice on their terms and effect to drafting substantive amendments and negotiating improved terms (our highest value settlement - for a company director - was for £1.5 million);

• defending executives facing High Court injunctions for alleged breach of restrictive covenants; negotiated substantial settlement packages;

• advising lawyers subjected to sexual orientation discrimination from managers at several London law firms;

• advising departing employees on avoiding and getting around various restrictive covenants;

• advising multiple employees facing disciplinary and grievance hearings;

• advising whistleblowers from 2 plc’s, negotiating severance packages;

• advising multiple employees in redundancy situations, negotiating improvements to their severance packages;

• presenting ET1/Claims and managing claims on behalf of multiple employees for unfair and wrongful dismissal (mainly sham/unfair redundancies, trumped up misconduct/underperformance allegations);

• defending employees falsely accused of sexual harassment, negotiating severance packages;

• advising an employee on defending his employer’s attempted clawback of 3 year retention plan;

• advising an employee facing a clawback of salary overpayments by his employer.

Slate Consult

Our specialist consultancy, Slate Consult, continues to provide employers with cost-effective access to expert employment law advice as well as HR, Health, Safety & Environmental services to ensure they are legally compliant.

Wellbeing

At Slate Legal, wellbeing is synonymous with windsurfing! Unfortunately, our weekly windsurf sessions were thwarted by a combination of lockdowns and reservoir closures this year. Nevertheless we still managed to get a good amount of time on the water and are hoping that Llandegfedd reservoir reopens on schedule on 1 March 2021!

Here’s one of our favourite videos from 2020 taken at one of our windsurfing wellbeing sessions on 19 September 2020 when our Managing Partner was honoured to be joined by local windsurfing guru and Intensive Care consultant, James Williams, one of the stars of the award-winning BBC1 documentary ‘Critical’:

Community investment

Each year we’ve tried to give something back to our local community through a variety of initiatives.

For the fifth year running, we took part in national pro bono week and spent the morning of 6 November answering queries from employees and micro businesses across Wales and England on a pro bono basis.

At the start of the year we sponsored our local under 9s rugby team ‘Newport High School Old Boys RFC’ and really liked their smart blue jackets. Unfortunately they didn’t get much wear out of them as the season was promptly curtailed by the Covid19 lockdown! Here’s hoping 2021 will be a different story!

We have provided financial support to our Charity of the Year 2020, Sparkle - based at Serennu Children’s Centre in Rogerstone, Newport, which does a fantastic job helping lots of local children and young people with a disability or developmental difficulty.

We continue to assist in fundraising for High Cross Primary School and also contributed a bottle of champagne for this year’s Christmas raffle.

Environment

Since our launch on 1 January 2016, we have tried our best to minimise our carbon footprint and have remained an active member of the Legal Sustainability Alliance.

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We love what we do and would be happy to talk to you about how we can make employment law work for you in 2021. Call us on 07956 085635, email us at info@slatelegal.co.uk or click here and complete our enquiry form and we'll get back to you asap.

New HM Treasury Direction re: CJRS

We now have the benefit of a new (31 page) Direction from HM Treasury which, together with the previous three directions, fleshes out the points made in our last Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (“CJRS”) blog.

The new Treasury Direction sets out the legal framework for the CJRS and explains in more detail how the newly extended CJRS will operate until 31 January 2021. A fifth Treasury Direction will be published later covering the remaining two months of the CJRS (February and March 2021).

Key points:

• eligible employees can be placed on furlough leave instead of being dismissed or laid off;

• it is no longer possible to retrospectively furlough employees - employers had until 13 November 2020 to put appropriate furlough agreements in place to achieve this;

• furlough agreements need to be put in place before the start of the relevant claim period, though they can be varied during the claim period. It should be possible to vary previous furlough agreements so long as this happens before furloughing the employee under this newly extended CJRS;

• as mentioned in our last blog, previous guidance suggested that if you were an employer considering dismissing any furloughed employees for redundancy (or any other reason), it would be prudent to issue notice of dismissal before 1 December 2020 otherwise you may not be able to claim under the CJRS in respect of any of the notice pay. The new Direction confirms our view - no claims may be made for any day that an employee is serving notice between 1 December 2020 and 31 January 2021;

• HMRC will publish information about CJRS claims on the internet, including the name of the employer and a “reasonable indication” of the amount claimed. Only if an employer can show that publication would expose their workforce to “serious risk of violence or intimidation”, will they be excluded from publication. This is unlikely to apply to most employers.

Extension of furlough scheme to 31 March 2021

The government has extended the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (‘CJRS’) aka 'furlough scheme' until 31 March 2021. The newly extended CJRS is more generous than the furlough scheme that has been running over the last 2 months, however the amount of the grant may be reduced for February and March 2021.

Key details of the newly extended CJRS:

• eligible employees can be placed on furlough leave instead of being dismissed or laid off;

• no requirement for either the employer or employee to have used the CJRS previously;

• employers have the option of full furlough, where the employee does no work for the employer, or flexi-furlough - where the employee can have a mixture of non-worked and worked hours:

  • employers can claim 80% of pay for non-worked hours capped at £2,500 pcm;

  • employees will be able to work part of their usual hours, with the employer paying for such worked hours in the usual way (as well as tax and employer's NICs and minimum automatic enrolment employer pension contributions on those worked hours);

• the CJRS scheme will be reviewed in January 2021 and if economic circumstances have improved enough employers may be asked to contribute more, so the 80% government grant may not last for the entire duration of the extension (until 31 March 2021);

• eligible employees are those who were on an employer's PAYE payroll by 23:59 on 30 October 2020 (a PAYE Real Time Information (“RTI”) submission notifying payment for that employee to HMRC must have been made on or before 30 October 2020);

• to claim the CJRS grant for furloughed hours, employers will need to report and claim for a minimum period of 7 consecutive calendar days;

• employers will need to report hours worked and the usual hours an employee would be expected to work in a claim period;

• whilst on CJRS employees continue to accrue continuous service/annual leave and can take annual leave during furlough leave, but the employer must 'top-up' their wage during any such leave;

• employees who have previously been furloughed continue to have their reference pay and hours based on the existing furlough calculations. Those employees who have not previously been furloughed will have a different pay/hours reference period;

• employees can be furloughed if they are shielding in line with public health guidance (or need to stay at home with someone who is shielding);

• whilst there is no legal obligation on employers to re-hire former employees, employees that were employed and on the payroll on 23 September 2020 who have since been made redundant or stopped working for their employer after that date can be re-employed and put onto the CJRS. The PAYE RTI submission notifying payment for those employees to HMRC must have been made on or before 23 September 2020;

• employers must have confirmed to their employees (or reached collective agreement with a trade union) in writing that they have been furloughed or flexibly furloughed;

• employers must ensure that the furlough agreement is consistent with employment, equality and discrimination laws, retain a written record of it for 5 years and keep records of how many hours their employees work and the number of hours they are furloughed (for example, not working), for 6 years;

• the terms of any furlough agreement must reflect the hours the employee has actually worked or not worked over the period of the agreement and must allow the employer to satisfy the terms of CJRS so they can make a claim in relation to hours not worked;

• employers can retrospectively furlough employees with effect from 1 November 2020 so long as the agreement to retrospectively claim furlough is put in place on or before 13 November 2020;

• the Job Support Scheme and the Job Retention Bonus have been put on hold for the time being;

• Check the Guidance to see which employees you can put on furlough to use the CJRS.

Many employers made redundancies during September and October factoring in the expected termination of the CJRS at the end of October 2020 and referring to this as part of their rationale for redundancies and/or the timing of them. It would be prudent for any employers with an ongoing redundancy process – i.e. where employees have not yet been given notice of dismissal - to pause and consider carefully the implications of the extended CJRS for their business before proceeding further with the redundancy process.

The guidance to the new CJRS states that “The government is reviewing whether employers should be eligible to claim for employees serving contractual or statutory notice periods and will change the approach for claim periods starting on or after 1 December 2020, with further guidance published in late November." It appears from this that if you are an employer who is currently considering dismissing any furloughed employees for redundancy (or any other reason), it would be prudent to issue notice of dismissal before 1 December otherwise you may not be able to claim under the CJRS in respect of any of the notice pay.

We anticipate that many employees will be challenging the fairness of any decision to dismiss them for redundancy prior to 31 March 2021 - the end of the newly extended CJRS. Accordingly businesses should consider very carefully whether the newly extended CJRS will provide sufficient support in order to retain employees until trading conditions have improved and, as always, be prepared to explain the basis for any dismissals, as well as the dismissal process followed.

Slate Legal consistently ranked as a Leading Firm by Legal 500 UK

We are delighted to retain our ranking by the Legal 500 UK as a leading employment law firm in Wales.

With 20 years experience as a specialist employment solicitor, our Managing Partner, James Moss, has also been recognised as a leading employment solicitor.

The Legal 500 UK is published annually based on independent research gathered from interviewing hundreds of thousands of clients and business contacts of law firms across the UK. The latest edition states:

Slate Legal’s Managing Partner, James Moss, commented:

This is our fifth year of trading and it’s great that we continue to be ranked as a leading employment law firm in Wales.

I am also very pleased to have been recognised as a leading employment lawyer. I qualified back in 2000, which seems like a lifetime ago. Since then so much has changed within the legal world and Slate Legal’s ability to adapt and continue to provide consistently excellent client service is, I believe, one of the main reasons why we remain a Leading Firm.

Employment Rates & Compensation Limits: 06.04.20 - 05.04.21

The UK government has updated certain rates and limits which affect how much compensation can be awarded by an Employment Tribunal for particular types of claims.

We've created a handy table summarising the key new rates and compensation limits from 6 April 2020 - 5 April 2021 inclusive. This should be particularly useful for HR Managers and for employees when working out the value of any potential employment-related claims.

We hope you will find this table to be a useful reference tool. As always, if you have any queries on this or any other employment law issue, please do not hesitate to contact us.

For the latest updates on key employment law cases and issues as well as links to useful articles, feel free to follow us on:

• Twitter: @Slate_Legal

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/slatelegal/