Professional May 2017

MEMBERSHIP INSIGHT

On your behalf

Policy team update

Diana Bruce MCIPPdip, CIPP senior policy liaison officer, divulges developments

G ender pay gap regulations for the private and voluntary sectors cover any employer with 250 or more ‘relevant’ employees in England, Wales and Scotland (but not Northern Ireland) on 5 April 2017. The Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017 came into force on 31 March 2017 and whilst the initial aim was to make the reporting requirements consistent across the public and private sectors, as the public sector already has specific duties on equality, the regulations needed to reflect this. More specifically there are differences between the public sector equality duties in Wales and Scotland as compared to England. The impact of devolution continues to add to the burden of UK employers. To ascertain employers’ awareness and subsequent readiness, we ran a poll through February and part of March asking: “Have you tested your gender pay gap data in preparation for the mandatory reporting duty that comes into effect in April 2017?”. We received 825 responses, 30% of which stated they had fewer than 250 employees so the duty to report did not apply. Of the remaining 70%, 24% had already tested their data and 29% were planning to do so before April. Only 9% were not aware of the new duty; hopefully they began their research to see if the regulations would apply to them, as a result. At the time of writing although the regulations have come into force, ACAS

(the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) and the Government Equalities Office have yet to publish any guidance for public sector employers; however, draft guidance has been published for employers in the private and voluntary sectors. There are several complexities still to be ironed out and so it may be that these will have to be resolved through the first year of reporting – an all too common situation for employers now when faced with new policy initiatives from government. In fact, the issue of delayed information and guidance across government generally is one which is causing great concern amongst stakeholder groups. The problem was discussed at the recent Employment and Payroll Group, of which the CIPP’s Helen Hargreaves is co-chair; HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has undertaken to escalate the issue. All published information on the gender pay gap reporting regulations can be found in the CIPP’s Policy News Journal , a benefit reserved exclusively for members, located at: http://bit.ly/2oxTlh8. If you would like to take part in our latest poll it is situated to the right of all of our news items on the CIPP website. Collection of student loans (CSL) forum ● Employer prompts – You may be familiar with the work of the CSL forum and the roll out in 2016 of the employer prompt (otherwise known as a generic notification email) which aims to ‘nudge’

employers to begin making deductions for student loans where they appear not to have actioned a SL1 notice. You may know that this process involves a first notification – a call to action if you will – and then, if no change is noted in the next full payment submission (FPS), a second prompt is issued. If no action is then taken a follow up phone call is made to see why the employer is failing to action the SL1. The most common reasons given appear to be “I didn’t know I had to” and “I haven’t received an SL1”. This is a first step towards improving the collection of student loan repayments by utilising the real time information (RTI) that is submitted by employers. We know that if you are reading this article it is unlikely that you will have been impacted by this issue; however, HMRC have discovered, during their calls, that many employers simply did not know to where the electronic notifications – which includes tax code notices – were being sent. So, it is always worth double checking that your processes are picking up all electronic notifications that are issued by HMRC. ● Off-payroll working in the public sector – Off–payroll working in the public sector, which came into effect for payments made on or after 6 April 2017, requires engagers to consider whether an engagement made between a public sector or agency (‘public sector’ is defined using definitions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Acts) and intermediary is captured by the intermediaries legislation (‘IR35’). Where the engagement is captured then the fee payer becomes the ‘employer’ for the

...issue of delayed information and guidance across government generally is one which is causing great concern...

| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | May 2017 | Issue 30 4

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