On 12 October 2017 we ran our latest Employment Law update workshop, to take our clients and contacts through the latest changes.

Here are some of the issues that we discussed, that you might need to know about for your business and employees.

Female managers earn less than their male colleagues. Data has been released showing that female HR managers earn on average £4500 less than their male counterparts. That’s a gender pay gap of 10% for doing the same job. Across all management roles, female managers earn £12000 less than their male colleagues – a gap of 26.8%. The new gender pay gap reporting rules require all companies with more than 250 employees do disclose the difference between average male and female hourly pay by April 2018. According to certain sources, so far only 77 companies have published their data – out of 7850 that will have to.

A new corporate offence of failing to prevent tax evasion came into effect on 30 September 2017. The offence covers organisations that fail to prevent instances when their associates, including employees, agents and service providers facilitate tax evasion. Organisations may be criminally liable if:

• their client committed tax fraud
• one of their associates deliberately and dishonestly facilitated the fraud or
• the organisation failed to prevent its associate from facilitating fraud.

Organisations can defend themselves by putting in place procedures such as risk assessments, due diligence assessments and fraud prevention policies and procedures.

Tribunal fees have been reversed. The Supreme Court has agreed that it is unlawful to charge tribunal fees, so they are no longer payable by a claimant on bringing an employment tribunal. All those claimants who have paid fees since they were introduced are to be reimbursed – that means that £32 million will be repaid!

Injury to feelings. The Vento Bands used to determine levels of compensation for injury to feelings in discrimination cases have been adjusted for claims issued on or after 11 September 2017 as follows:

• Lower band – £800-£8400
• Middle band – £8400-25200
• Upper band – £25200-£42000 and exceptional cases over £42000.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR requires that personal data be processed according to many of the same principles as under the current Data Protection Act 1998. The GDPR also has new requirements:

• that restrict the use of consent as a justification for processing data
• on demonstrating compliance through the documentation of data processing activities
• on adopting organisational measures for data protection such and policies and practices, and
• on providing more information to employees and job applicants on the purpose and legal grounds for collecting their data and their rights in relation to their personal data.

There is still much to find out about GDPR and how it will affect your business, so we’ll cover this in more detail at our next workshop in 2018.

In the meantime, if you need any more advice on any of these topics, please do get in touch by calling 0118 940 3032 or emailing me here.