A reminder of all the employment law changes and updates for April 2022.

Gender Pay Gap Reporting

If your business has over 250 employees you are obliged to publish a gender pay gap report each year, uploaded and published on the government website. The deadline was 31 March 2022 for any public sector organisation or 5 April 2022 for any private or voluntary sector organisation.

Personal Protective Equipment for Limb (B) Workers

As we noted back in February, if you have limb (b) workers you must carry out a new risk assessment as to whether a worker requires PPE. If that is the case, employers must then carry out a PPE suitability assessment and provide the PPE free of charge as they do for employees.

This is because the Personal Protective Equipment at Work (Amendment) Regulations 2022 (PPER 2022) came into force on 6 April 2022 amending the 1992 Regulations (PPER 1992).

Review & Increase employer salaries

Ensure that all salaries have been reviewed and the new hourly rates implemented. From 1 April 2022, the National Living Wage increased by 6.62 2.2% (59p per hour) from £8.91 to £9.50, payable to all workers aged 23 and above. Further details here.

IR35 compliance

The employer now bears the responsibility of determining employment status and assessing if IR35 is applicable and the initial 12 month period (in which HMRC indicated it would ease enforcement penalties if there was no clear evidence of deliberate non-compliance) has now ended. Employers should therefore ensure that this review has been completed.

Review other policies

It is always advisable to review and update employment and HR policies, particularly in light of these changes:

For those employing health and social care staff, from 1 April 2022 it is no longer mandatory for staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19.

The State Pension Rate increases on 11 April 2022 to £141.85 for basic pension and £185.15 for full pension - an increase of 3.1%.

The weekly pay cap for redundancy increased on 6 April 2022 to £571 (from £544) when based on weekly pay, length of service and age.

Red Diesel

Particularly of interest for those in the construction industry, red diesel can now only be used for specific purposes. The law changed on 1 April (full details here). 

Right to work checks

Employers should ensure that they continue to conduct right to work checks on all employees, and retain evidence of all checks and documents provided. The (deferred) deadline for using adjusted checks has continued to be extended by the Home Office - now up to 30 September 2022 (inclusive) rather than 5 April 2022 as previously indicated.

From 6 April 2022, checks can now only be done online for those who hold a BRC (biometric residence card), BRP (biometric residence permit) or FWP (frontier worker permit). The online check must be done using the Home Office’s online right to work check service with a manual check no longer being an option.

The individual whose details are being checked must generate an access code, valid for 30 days, and give this to the employer, who uses this share code and the prospective employee’s date of birth to carry out the online check.