COVID-19
Our advice in response to the coronavirus outbreak
The rapid and constantly changing environment that COVID-19 has created in the UK has presented the business community with many urgent and unique challenges which will continue to develop over the coming weeks and months. This is our time to support you, your business and your industry to meet and overcome these challenges. Our nimble and flexible approach has enabled us to already provide solutions to our clients in handling issues relating to COVID-19. Our decisive attitude has identified and enabled speedy resolutions to moving services online.
As the situation continues to progress, we are here to provide answers to your questions, to give guidance on your decisions and to support you to make the sometimes difficult choices that will protect your business in the weeks to come and through to the other side.
With so much information to take in an top of managing your business, we're making it our job to keep things simplified and relevant. We will be keep our guidance updated as the situation develops and our team available to take your call.
We've set up a toolkit specifically to help you deal with COVID-19 in your place of work. You'll find a range of free briefings that precis the Government's and others' advice into manageable and easily digestible documents. You'll also find letter templates for handling staff that you have has to…
You'll find accurate and relevant information across our website regarding COVID-19 including actions that employers should take and processes to follow. Sometimes though you might want to hear it from the horses mouth so here we've compiled what we think are the most pertinent pages from the .gov website.
Covid-19 continues to hog the headlines in one form or another. Despite the Omicron variant having less severe symptoms, its contagiousness has created a new wave of issues. The number of employees in the UK who have the disease and therefor need to self-isolate is affecting productivity and supply chains,…
With new Covid-19 cases hovering around the 40,000 per day mark over the past few weeks, we are frankly reminded that we remain in the midst of a pandemic. Despite the vaccine rollout vastly reducing the number of infected individuals requiring hospitalisation, positive test results still require isolation and are…
You don’t need us to tell you that the view of the Employment Law landscape has shifted as a result of the Covid pandemic and Brexit. We must therefore maintain a watchful on eye on how any new issues that are presented are dealt with by Tribunals and the Courts.…
After being extended to October 2020 and then to April 2021, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, or Furlough Scheme, is finally due to conclude at the end of September. As of July, ONS figures show that less than 8% of employees remained on furlough for most regions in England and…
One of the peculiarities of the Covid-19 emergency occurring during our current age of digital transformation is something that is widely being referred to as the “Pingdemic”. On the run up to, and following Covid freedom day on the 19th July, there has been a marked resurgence in the number…
Stage 4 of the Government’s Roadmap out of lockdown plan finally comes into effect, in the main, on "Covid Freedom Day", Monday, 19th July. Controversially perhaps, the decision to unlock has been pressed ahead with, despite a new wave of Covid-19 cases emerging, attributed to the highly contagious Delta variant…
The combination of a re-surging economy and the effects of Brexit on the availability of foreign workers has bought recruitment to the top of the problem pile again for UK businesses; particularly in the hospitality and leisure sectors. I read just last week how an award-winning restaurant in Devon re-opened…
Although some may say that a global pandemic was due, nobody really saw it coming. If they had, we may have been better prepared with stocks of personal protective equipment and the like. From an economic point of view, it was a fortunate that the Government was relatively creative and…
A friend of mine had his night out at the cinema frustrated last week when, despite buying and paying for his ticket in advance, he arrived at the venue, one of a national chain, to find it closed. The manager happened to be leaving the site at the time he…
With the Bank of England earlier this month forecasting the biggest economic bounce back since WWII, and the final stages of the lockdown lifting plan remaining intact, despite the Indian Covid variant, it seems that we might actually be on the cusp of an economic resurgence. There might be an…
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A couple of months ago, we covered the subject of whether or not businesses and organisations could mandate that employees receive the Covid vaccination. It was the hot topic at that time and you can see that post, and watch the presentation from our consultant Owen Lee here https://hrchampions.co.uk/covid-19/covid-the-vaccine-conundrum-277 Since…
We’ve probably all come to accept that life is never going to return completely to how it was. There is plenty of talk and predictions over what the new normal will look like and there is also much hankering over getting back to the normal that we once knew just…
One of the positive side-effects of the Covid experience has been that there has been less general illness in the UK workforce. Or, in Office of National Statistics speak, a reduction in working days lost to sickness absence. In fact, 2020 shows the lowest sickness absence rate, just 1.8%, since…
For over 12 months now we’ve been living and working in the most unpredictable of environments; one where the rules, at times, seem to have changed almost daily. We have had to learn to accept change on a huge scale and with home-working becoming the norm for very many of…