Keeping up with changes to employment legislation – how to stay compliant as an employer

As soon as you start to contract or employ other people to work for your business, you take on certain responsibilities and legal obligations as an employer, like making sure your employees are paid fairly and get the right amount of annual leave.

When you have a business to run and clients to keep happy, it can be hard to stay up to date with legislation changes or anomalies (like the introduction of additional bank holidays for Royal occasions!) and understand how they apply to your business.  Failure to do so though, could land you in trouble.

Some changes are given a lot of media coverage and are fairly straightforward to apply, such as changes to statutory rates of pay, including the National Minimum Wage, so they’re easier to follow and implement.  Others though, are not always picked up by mainstream media, are more subtle or are or more complicated in nature, so it’s harder to keep up with.

An example of the regulations changes that might affect you at present are the updates to the Working Time Directive in regard to holiday entitlement and holiday pay calculations, for which the government issued new guidance on 1^st January this year.

They mainly apply to irregular hours workers and part-year workers so if you have any of these in your workforce, you need to get up to speed.

Some of the changes apply to regular hours workers too, so it’s worth all employers checking if they are affected.  Pure HR’s have highlighted some of the key points in a recent article on their website Holiday Pay and Entitlement Reforms – Pure Human Resources or you can refer to the government guidance for full details.

Sometimes it’s not the legislation that changes but something else that affects your ability to stay compliant with the law.  This year, for example we have an unusual situation around how the Easter bank holidays fall which may affect businesses whose holiday calendars run 1^st April to 31^st March and lead to employees facing a short fall of leave in the next calendar year.

If this is how your holiday calendar runs, read Pure HR’s article here for further advice : Bank Holidays and Annual Leave Entitlement 2024-25 – Pure HR (purehumanresources.co.uk)

With an uncertain political and economic future, it’s possible that we will see many more changes in the coming years.

Unless you have a dedicated HR person in your business, with a strong understanding of employment law, to keep track of things, it can be useful to follow a trusted HR professional or consultancy (such as Pure Human Resources) on social media or sign up to receive their news and updates, so that you can get the highlights of any changes and seek further guidance where necessary.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/pure-human-resources-ltd

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PureHRLtd/

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