 welcome to the HR online surgery. We have with us today Gary Morrison who's a senior lawyer from Co-op's UK. He has extensive knowledge of employment law. We have Kate Fielding who's the Co-op's UK HR Reward and Policy Manager and a member of the Chartered Institute of Personal Development and we also have Tim Knowles who's an expert in employment law, HR policy, employee relations and a qualified solicitor and so without further ado I'm going to let you just hear the panel speak just say a little bit about themselves and what they've been dealing with in the past couple of weeks and and then we'll take your questions from there. Gary, Gary would you like to unmute yourself? Sorry, apologies for that. That's all right thank you. I'm Gary Morrison over the past couple of weeks and I've been dealing with a number of queries in a number of areas. First of all it was self-isolation and SSP moving on then to things like furloughing and what should be paid, shielding and even had some queries on the working time regulations and whether they still apply at the moment. Thanks Irina. Hi everybody yeah so for me it's more around the HR and employee relations side of things so looking at your relationships with your employees if you're needing to furlough employees whether or not they're amenable to that whether there are issues between different employees if you're asking some employees to go on furlough leave and other employees to continue working and any impact that that has in the employee relations between your teams. And Sam, thank you. Good afternoon everybody. I've been working in three areas phased over the last three weeks really. I think the first week was concentrating on leave and pay and the second week was dealing with flowing in the main and this week it's moved on to preparation with employers for what could be the more disturbing side if cases develop and thinking about welfare measures for staff where either they or somebody close to them becomes unwell. Okay thank you and I think there's a combined experience of about 35 years between you so that's useful to know. And also Tim did you say that there was some kind of disclaimer to the advice that's given today you wanted to share? Of course thanks for reminding me Irina. Most of the attendees that I saw on the list are members of Cooperatives UK and there's nothing preventing us giving legal advice to members of Cooperatives UK. That's fine but a few of you have signed up for the webinar. We can answer questions generically but we can't give legal advice on the specifics of your own issue or the circumstances of one of your employees if you're not a member of Cooperatives UK but generic advice our understanding of the guidance that's been published and you will be able to get information from our website as well. Okay thanks for that so we've got a few I know we've got questions coming in thick and fast we've got a few that have been emailed to us prior to the webinar and I'm sure that it'll be relevant to many people so you wouldn't be surprised to know that most of the end discussions have been about furloughing and the questions coming in. The furloughing issue seems to fall into two camps the questions related to the technicalities of furloughing and then there's a second section that's kind of unfolding which is all about the creative ways of how to deal with furloughed stuff. So just going on the technicalities side of things first I'll just go through some of the questions that are coming in hopefully they're relevant to others as well. What are the sensible examples of selection criteria for selecting furloughed workers when will we be able to apply and when will wages be reimbursed to them? In the guidance HMRC talks of retrospective audit to confirm eligibility is there any further information on this so over to you. Well I'll start with the first ones if you like. I think in relation to the furloughing scheme this is going to be administered by HMRC it's going to be an online system you calculate your claim in accordance with guidance and input the details. It's scheduled to become opened at the end of April so it's in development by HMRC and they're saying that they will establish back's payments very quickly. You can claim three weeks at a time but no more than one claim in every three weeks. We don't know what the retrospective audit will look like. What I strongly suspect is that because they hold PAYE information already about staff there will be some kind of background checking system where they'll see whether the claim that you've made is within certain parameters and if it falls outside those parameters I suspect they will look at things. We don't know what the HMRC audit process will be and I think we'll have to wait and see. Any HMRC audit process tends to be quite intimidating. They ask for a lot of information and they follow up on that information once they have the details from you. In terms of selection for following I think one of the main selection issues is going to be where has work ceased for one reason or another. Trade may have gone down in particular areas. Business units may have had to close and I think a primary selection criteria is going to be led by who is unable to work because of COVID-19. You can put other selection criteria. They may be forward-looking in terms of skills or knowledge and experience that you need to fulfil what work is left to do but other than that it's trying to adopt selection criteria that don't in any way discriminate against anyone indirectly and as with any I think the best guidance to look at online because you can't see immediate guidance about fair redundancy selection process, fair following selection processes, but there's plenty of information online about fair redundancy and the type of criteria you might use in those circumstances and I think you could adopt a similar approach when choosing people to follow. In terms of eligibility is the firm eligibility criteria apart from considering laying off due to the COVID-19 impact? For example do you have to be down 50% before it kicks in? I guess that's before you feel eligible. 50% down on takings? No I mean my understanding is that you don't need to demonstrate that you're in a position where you may cease trading or you're at risk of ceasing trading. The whole purpose of the following job retention scheme is to avoid redundancies effectively. As Tim said in respect to the selection, any sort of selection for who should be followed really will be very similar to who might be made redundant. There's no criteria as far as I'm aware that says you need to be down in trading or have ceased trading or be on the verge of ceasing trading and it is just a matter of ensuring that you can demonstrate that the whole purpose is to avoid making people redundant. Other questions again on the kind of technical side of things they would like to make use of the scheme. Are they able to back date the following to the first of March if staff have been working throughout the month of March? You can only back date if actually staff have not been working in that period. You can back date to prior to the furlough and coming into the first of March provided your employees were already employed or before the 28th of February. So effectively what they're saying is if you have made some the redundant prior to the furlough and scheme coming in and you would like to retain that person's employment then you can back date to the first of March. I think that's a great point you make Gary, but the trigger to beginning these payments is agreeing with staff that they're going to be laid off. So whilst you can claim back to first of March that's intended to cover those staff who have been laid off. Yeah and then quite quickly we're going into a lot of the questions which are all around kind of the creative thinking around furloughing. So they range but I'll go through some of the ones that have come online at the moment. So can furlough staff volunteer for the organisation that has furloughed them? What are the limitations of this including the number of hours and how can this be checked or how will this be checked? Do we know even? I can answer that if you like. So we know that furloughed staff can't work for an organisation if it's going to further them economically or help them in that way. So volunteering for your own organisation my understanding is that that is a no-no. They can volunteer for other organisations. So obviously for the NHS for other key organisations at this time but not for their own organisation. Other questions around the use of furloughing as well. Can directors be furloughed and if so do they still have decision-making powers if remaining members of the co-op hold meetings to discuss important topics in their absence? So to furlough somebody they need to be on PAYE. So if they're employed and subject to deductions on PAYE they can certainly be furloughed. As far as we can see there will be a distinction between directors duties and work as an employee and therefore it should be possible for you to undertake governance duties whilst you're furloughed. The key point that Kate already mentioned is that whilst you're not allowed to work and the way that they're defining that is making money for your employer or providing services to your employer. So the only exceptions to that we think are going to be governance duties for directors and as you'll have seen in the guidance you can also undertake training. I suppose it's possible to do voluntary work for your employer but not if that involves making money or providing services. I've certainly read some guidance that says as a director provided you're an employee you can be furloughed but you are able to do or carry out or continue with your statutory duties as a director. Okay so just checking for any problems if worker is furloughed for three weeks then works for one week then furloughed for further three weeks and then works for one week and so on. We've had this question before coming in via email as well basically can we furlough for three weeks after working for one week and then furlough for three weeks? My understanding is that yes you can. The minimum period of furlough is three weeks and you can rotate staff to avoid again the whole purpose is to avoid permanently laying them off or making them redundant so yes you can rotate staff to the extent that they will come in and out possibly even on a rotor but there's a minimum period of three weeks furlough. I mean one thing I would emphasize as well is if you are going to furlough employees then you have to have their agreements unless you've got a provision within the contract or perhaps a collective agreement or some relevant agreement that allows you to lay employees off you have to have their agreements to lay them off or furlough them but as I'm aware there's no reason why you can't rotate provided the period that any particular employee is furloughed for is a minimum of three weeks. Okay and will they need proof of contracted hours? How does it work with dates and timings? Do we start on the first of the month? Does it matter? If anyone can help on that? Yeah well I think the way the area to look at is not about how's it work it's about how much you can claim and how you can calculate that. It may be distinct from what they would have worked had they carried on working but essentially you can claim back what the the hire of what they were paid in the same month a year ago or average earnings for the last 12 months so it's not really a question of how many hours or what the working pattern is or would have been but for this happening it's a question of what you can claim and how you calculate that. Okay I'm keen to invite other people to talk as well those that are phoning in and those that want to verbalise their question so Kelvin if yours is I can see your hands up if yours is in the same remit let's get you to um to pose your question to the panel. Can you hear us Kelvin Tebs? Yes I can hear you. Hello? Go ahead just speak into the computer and the panel is ready to answer your question. All right I've been listening to this I just want to know I've been guided as one of the Irish people and I've been told to self self isolate for 12 weeks all I want to know is do I need to pay for them 12 weeks or not? Hi Kelvin I'll do my best to help you. Which co-op do you work for? Skirbit Road, Boston. That's one of the Lincolnshire Food Centre. Yes that's correct. We can only give advice to member organisations I'm afraid Kelvin so what I suggest you need to do is speak to the HR team and indeed you're doing that because there's two of them on the webinar today who are participants like you are. So what I suggest is about your self isolation or rather the social distancing the 12 weeks that you've got to do speak to Lincolnshire co-ops HR team you should be able to give you some guidance. Okay thank you for that. There's a kind of related question how should we treat employees who ask to stay at home even if they can't work from home because they live with someone who is in the vulnerable or extremely vulnerable group where they can't be furloughed? Well my understanding is that is it the employee who's in the vulnerable group or the person who's who they're living with sorry Arina. Who they live with so somebody they're living with is in the vulnerable or extremely vulnerable group? Because the people who've been identified as being in the vulnerable group have had letters or the high-risk people which takes them into the realm of what the term is shielding. My understanding is that if they're living with people who are within the vulnerable group then they may be self isolating and may be due to SSP under the new regulations. Okay could I just add something to that the so we've a lot of different technical phrases popping up in the guidance and the policy announcements that have been made. So self isolation is the seven or 14 day period may even stretch to 28 where you're showing symptoms or you live with somebody that's showing symptoms which we know is clearly going to trigger sick pay even if it's not you personally that's showing the symptoms. So if you live with somebody whose symptomatic sick pay is triggered for the self-isolation period. If you're in a vulnerable group you'd probably be advised to work at home where you can. If you're in one of the extremely at-risk groups you'll have been told to isolate for 12 weeks. The living with somebody and supporting them through social distancing perhaps particularly stringent social distancing so you don't want to go to work the legal position is SSP is not triggered and there's no right to pay if you choose not to go into work in those circumstances but many co-ops are adopting different solutions to this so there are many examples of ways in which people are trying to support their employees one of the ways that they're doing it is through having special provisions another way that a lot of employers are doing it is through investigating this following scheme to see whether or not it could be agreed that somebody is followed because they're stringently social isolating and thereby some employment costs could be recovered and the government guidance seems to indicate that that could be done by agreement. Somebody's asking can we require encouraged staff to do training while following I think you've answered that is that yes. Yeah that's one of the express things that's mentioned the only thing that to remember about period time for if you do choose to reduce wages to 80% because it's the maximum you can claim back whilst they're not working that might be below the national living wage and government has said that's okay because they're not working but the only proviso on training is that everyone must at least be paid the national living wage for training time. Can you confirm if the maximum 2500 gross is these gross or net pay? It's gross pay I think yeah. So you can claim as far as we can see it the 2500 is the cap on the gross pay that you can claim but there are some on-costs that you can claim on top of that and it seems on top of that you may be able to get for example employers national insurance and some other on-costs of employment. Pension contributions Tim. Pension contributions. Yeah thanks Kate it's pension contributions up to the auto-enrollment level but nothing beyond that that you pay as an employer. Thank you for that question Kate. So employees need to agree to be furloughed if they withhold agreements so the employer is forced to make them redundant are they entitled to full pay for the delay and consultation period? Yes it would be my answer if an employee doesn't agree the whole purpose of the job retention scheme is to avoid redundancies if somebody's not able to if somebody's not prepared to agree to be furloughed and if you haven't got any flexibility within the contract which may allow you to redeploy them elsewhere then you may be faced with a redundancy situation and that would be dealt with as you would deal with any other redundancy ordinarily you'd need to go through the formalities of consulting with them and meeting with them to try and avoid the redundancy and that would be a process which whilst ongoing the employee would remain an employee so they would continue to be paid following which you'd need to provide notice and perhaps a redundancy payment if applicable. As we're unsure what to do about holiday we notice the guidelines for key industry are relaxed but we're not in that category can we still carry holiday over and we're trying to work out an approach on how we use the holidays? Yes so in fact the the government have announced that you they are relaxing the work time regulations to allow you to carry holiday forward when you wouldn't normally be allowed to so the first four weeks of holiday entitlement you're now allowed to carry forward for the next two years if need be but they remain in 1.6 weeks of holiday leave which you can currently by agreement carry forward for one year is still only for one year but obviously you need to you'd need to think about the well-being sides of allowing employees to to take their holidays as and when they're able to so we wouldn't advise you sort of forcing employees to carry holidays forward unless you really needed to from a business perspective. Okay and we've got some more questions coming in about statutory sick pay I'll come to those in a moment so again just more creative ways of thinking about the furloughing and if a worker signed a contract a month ago begin on the 1st of April and that staff member still be furloughed if COVID-19 has resulted in all work being cancelled by Mayans. So you must have been on the payroll on the 28th of February the following scheme won't cover you if you were employed after that. The only circumstances somebody could be brought back is where a few weeks ago you made somebody redundant you can now bring them back and furlough them no guidance on what you do if you've paid them a redundancy payment or anything like that but we know in those circumstances people can be reengaged and furloughed but it won't cover somebody beginning work on the 1st of March or the 1st of April. You may be able to look at in those circumstances maybe the statutory layoff scheme that existed before furloughing came in to operation again you would need some of these unless you've got a contractual right to lay some of the off you would need their agreement to lay them off as Tim correctly says the furloughing scheme doesn't apply unless you're employed on or before the 28th of February so you're left with this statutory layoff scheme which means that you will lay an employee off or a worker off and you've got to pay them guarantee pay which is a period of five days within a three month period and each the daily payment for each day is limited to £29 so it's the daily rate of pay or £29 which has the lower you've got to pay that for one week in 13 and then you're liable to pay that again and it's not much pay for the employee but it does actually avoid them being made redundant and they can during any period of that statutory layoff seek to claim benefits from the benefits agency. Okay any more on that then email us and if you're needing the support of our staff and you want to become a member then just let us know the membership at uk.coop. Similarly other people wondering whether they can challenge the start date of furloughing they have two part-time staff that would have started with them on the 2nd of March but if the 28th or 29th of February had fallen on the Monday I guess that would be the 2nd of March and not on the Saturday they would have been eligible. Interesting question about whether to challenge. You won't be able to challenge it with HMRC I don't think so the only route that I couldn't think of would be to lobby government perhaps through members of parliament etc but the rules would need to change to be able to challenge that. Yeah another one can furloughed staff in the filling the government furloughing portal or does that count as work? I would think it probably does. I think in some some employment they're going to have to aren't they and it does say you're not allowed to make money for your employer but I think given that you're just recovering costs and the purpose of the work is avoiding making redundancies I can't see that causing an issue. Do we need one person to keep working in order to apply for the government help? I'm sorry we've done that one. Anything from the new COVID legislation that we need to be aware of and could we have a quick summary about the statutory sick pay section? I think in terms of the if you're talking about the coronavirus act that was put through parliament last week there's actually not much in it from a HR perspective. We've updated our website with all of the content about volunteering for the NHS or for social services so there's lots of FAQs on our website about volunteering and those provisions were actually set out in the coronavirus act. Unfortunately in relation to SSP and things like that all of the provisions in the act just give government the power to lay regulations down so they can do that much more quickly than an act of parliament and all the act does is enables them to do it so we're going to have to keep an eye out on changes to SSP so at the moment we're waiting for those. They have said SSP is going to be a day one right that will be backdated to the 13th of March and if you're an employer that employs less than 250 people a number which they take from the 28th of February again another reference to the 28th of February if you employ less than 250 people you can claim back statutory sick pay payments and the main points I'd take home about SSP are that it's going to be payable obviously where somebody's ill whether it's coronavirus or something else but it's unique in relation to coronavirus because you might not be ill if somebody in your house is showing symptoms you should be self-isolating the household should be self-isolating for 14 days and so even if you've no symptoms whatsoever and you don't get any symptoms within the 14-day period you're deemed sick for SSP purposes. I think that's the best overview of what we know about the statutory sick pay provisions so far but there is more to come on that and we will update the FAQs on our website when they bring in that subordinate legislation. Okay just staying a little bit on the theme of sick pay can we furlough staff on purely medical reasons because they are for example shielding due to an ongoing medical condition and also if someone is furloughed and then goes back to and then goes sick do they remain on furlough pay or sick pay some colleagues get enhanced sick pay so would they get 100% pay if so. So with respect to the selection for furlough in the the guidance clearly indicates that a furloughed somebody who's shielding can be furloughed and I think the risk for me and something that would need to take into consideration is the actual nature of the condition that means they're shielding and whether that may amount to a disability within the meaning of disability in the Quality Act and clearly if we're selecting them on that basis and perhaps only paying 80% I think it does open the door to a claim or possibly an argument that they're being treated less favourably i.e. being paid 80% as a consequence of their condition but certainly the guidelines say that furloughed employees who are shielding can be furloughed. Can I just add something to that as well in some circumstances particularly if somebody is isolating themselves they're not sick nobody in their house is sick they're just with somebody that's vulnerable or extremely vulnerable to this condition. If they are facing circumstances where they might be unpaid if they isolate for a period the next four, eight or 12 weeks in the cases of extremely vulnerable groups and I think there will be some pressure to furlough them in that they will be requesting it. The guidance doesn't prevent an employer furloughing somebody as Gary said it would be very difficult to have a selection criteria that furloughed people have particular health conditions that would probably be discriminatory in some cases but employees might request that rather than be told to stay at home without pay they may well request or why can't you put me on furlough leave and I think if you've certainly if you've got people requesting it or volunteering and you're happy to accept their request or their their voluntary application for to be furloughed then I think it can be done. One co-op in an unfortunate position they've got no cash reserves and a trade no income no likelihood of obtaining the loan it seems likely we would not be able to furlough our workers is it possible to either lay people off or make them redundant until the situation changes even if not mentioned in their contracts? Going back to the if they're not going to furlough then the choices are really the statutory layoff scheme which provides for guaranteed pay and you could also if they're agreeable to it reach some arrangement where they're laid off without pay there's nothing to prevent an agreement being reached where an employer and employee agree that the employee will be laid off without any pay not even guaranteed pay but that certainly would need to be an express agreement and failing all of that then yeah we're into the territory of unfortunate redundancies but yeah there are sort of a couple of options other than furlough the last one is redundancy but there is the possibility that you could agree with them to be laid off with the guaranteed pay that we discussed earlier or in fact laid off without pay if they agree to it that would mean their employment would continue but just without pay and if there may be clearly you would need to go through a procedure and make them redundant whether they'd be entitled to a redundancy payment would depend on the length of service but actually that latter option redundancy would mean that their employment then ends it's a no longer an employee and kind of link to that is they cannot afford to pay workers until they receive a furlough payment um any advice I guess that's not business advice but that it does go to show what sort of situations people are dealing with out there these are tricky aren't they um obviously if you go on our website there are links to different types of support that are available and the government's position is that you should try and get one of the other kinds of grants you should be speaking to your local authority to see if there's a a means of in some way bridging that gap if you've tried all of those things um and there really is no other way out you might need to consider putting people on unpaid leave until you recover um some's uh some's paid um so it's a tricky tricky one but the government are saying do not uh make people redundant um for the time being um so if you can't pay them um it's not really having an agreement that they will be on unpaid leave it's sending them home and you can't pay them because you don't have the money and you can't get access to those grants but they are saying don't make them redundant um the scheme will come through um in terms of annual leave then as well and um in relation to furlough and can you continue to accrue annual leave whilst on furlough leave okay yes my understanding is as a furlough employee you remain an employee and all the terms and conditions of your employment continue to apply during that period of furlough thank you okay did you want to add anything to that no thank you I was going to say exactly what Gary said but I was too slow getting my unmute button just to go back to the point Tim was making about employees laid off without pay I mean clearly if an employee's agreed that with you then there's probably not going to be any difficulties um one of the things should point out and it it doesn't appear to apply with the the job retention or the furlough schemes with the statutory layoff scheme um or were perhaps an employee's agreed to be laid off without pay um those provisions provide that if you're on less than half a week's pay um for any four consecutive weeks or any six weeks in 13 um the employee can come back and ask to be made redundant so if they're not on the furlough scheme if they're just on layoff because perhaps you can't afford to pay them um there is a provision in in that legislation that allows the employee if they're on half a week's pay for for any four consecutive weeks or any six weeks in 13 they can come back and ask you as the employer to make them redundant okay that's a really interesting point um some asking whether we're going to produce uh either a checklist or some kind of resource template letters that can maybe available to help um to furlough employees um there is no particular template on furlough employees as i understand it can anyone help there i've certainly drafted a letter um for um our members certainly have used forwarded one to one particular member who asked me to draft one and there is a standard one an expert hr actually but he just explains that you are being followed um um and there will be some resources as well on the um on the website so keep looking at that uk.coop um if it's not exactly what you need it's always been updated so it's worth checking back into that website and just seeing what's available at that time um it'll be about timing on furlough and will it last more than three months do you think it's likely do we know the um furloughing scheme is is three months so it's first of march to the end of june will it be extended um we don't know the answer to that um but it's in for a fixed period and it will be reviewed near the end i think we'll just have to see um whether the economy is moving again and people are back in work and we're we far less restrictions by the end of june um but we can't speculate but we do know this scheme is in from the beginning of march to the end of uh to june sorry it's first it'll be March April and May three months and um more questions on uh both zero contracts and also very few hours that you're employed in so is there a minimum threshold for claims can we claim for staff who are only contracted for eight hours per month for example and also on a zero contract with varied hours does the employer make ongoing payments based on the average or is it just a one-off payment so zero if you've got people on variable hours or zero hours um you're looking at um average earnings um i said earlier that uh you can look at how much they earned in the same month the previous year or an average of their monthly earnings for the last year um but it does say in relation to zero hours um they then average earnings can be used does it say anything more about um do you pay the employee or does the employee get paid in a one-off payment or does it kind of is it ongoing um as as would normally a salary thing so i think what you've got an average earnings so say if somebody i think in the example you gave there it was eight hours per month on average you'd make um uh you'd pay them eight hours a month it'd be up to you whatever normal pay cycle you use whether that's weekly or monthly um but you'd pay them those eight hours um and provided their for load for more than three weeks uh you can make a claim for 80 percent uh of their average earnings you follow an employee who can't and doesn't want to work because of your child care responsibilities related to COVID-19's nursery school closures i think i think we've gone through that one haven't we it's it's the same point about people that are vulnerable somebody in your house that's vulnerable at the moment there's there's nothing um suggesting that it cannot be done but it'd be very dangerous as a selection criteria for forced for where you're trying to impose following on a number of people but where you're trying to deal with things through agreement you might seek volunteers i don't say anything wrong with seeking volunteers or responding to requests can i be furloughed i don't see anything wrong with uh considering those as an employer no matter how they were motivated uh yeah so it's the same answer we gave for vulnerable groups earlier okay um do we know when employers are likely to receive their first access grant payment from hmrc um so i guess that's small business grant i'm not aware of when that'll be paid i don't know that you've got anything i think it's going to be once the scheme comes into play in april you're going to be able to put claims through and you're going to set up some of the details they require from you are things like your bank account details and they're suggesting that these are going to be paid very quickly indeed um by backs transfer okay do we need agreement in writing from our employees that they accept the furlough conditions um it's what it's wise to get anything in writing if you can possibly i can't imagine i mean the alternative and if people are agreeing there's no reason why they wouldn't document that certainly in advising employers it's wise to document every agreement really but um and i do think you will probably need at some point when they're carrying out the audit um in fact i think having said that i think the scheme does require you to provide some evidence uh to um hmrc that it has been these employees have agreed and have been furloughed so you would need something in writing yes yeah i've seen that gary in the guidance it says um the point you made earlier you must agree it um once it's agreed your employer must write to you confirming that you've been furloughed and uh certainly we can put a very generic template uh on the website uh quite quickly if people are interested in seeing what a phone letter might look like we're just coming to the last five minutes of the webinar obviously there's a lot of questions um to go through still just to note that these questions are all going to be recorded so we can um go back to these and um have a look at them and then provide them as a resource later for everyone that's on the webinar so if you haven't been if your question hasn't been asked at this time um bear with us we'll probably be sending all of this out to your email anyway that you've registered with so um there's a couple more as I understand it's staff whose fixed term contracts end today can be furloughed as long as we extend their contracts today is that correct yeah you wouldn't treat a fixed term employee differently than anyone else um if you're going to extend the contract then um you would do so if you're going to extend the contract and they need to be furloughed i can't see that um that would make any difference and certainly you know you wouldn't be not extending it just because they're fixed term employees that might cause some difficulty i don't know whether you've got anything to add on that same no i think so long as they were on pa y e on the 28th of february um there's no reference to employers having to stand by fixed terms and let people go um and that would seem the opposite of what they're trying to achieve there's nothing suggesting that there'll be any restrictions on you uh extending fixed term contracts um okay in the last few moments as well if you if the participants want to upvote any burning questions that you've seen that hang in there for a while and you just want us to make sure that we get those asked first please upvote any questions that you can see there um Giovanna i know that you've got some specific inquiries there i think if you want to email those to membership at uk.coop um we can look at that um offline um how do we distinguish between full-time and part-time employees and employees whose pay varies you should have in your contracts um some reference to what a full-time working week is um and if certainly if you're prorating anything you must be working on a full-time working week to be able to prorate things for part-timers um there's no distinction between part-time staff and people whose um whose earnings vary um as i say the focused obviously a salaried employer a salaried employee who doesn't have variable wages it's going to be pretty easy to um see which was the higher i.e. their pay in the same month a year ago although their last 12 months of earnings usually it would be the average earnings of the last 12 months so for somebody salaried it will be quite simple but as soon as we get into zero hours part-time staff that occasionally work overtime we're into the um averaging i think um but it's the same essential calculation there's one calculation of how you calculate how much you can claim we are coming to the last couple of minutes i just wonder whether there's um any overriding comments that the panel want to make before we um call off and um and then i'll just let people know how else they can get in touch with us um but yeah um tim gary kate you wanted to say anything before we leave so it i think my concluding point for people would be to do keep checking on our website because as we learn more and more information we are updating the FAQs that uh that are posted up there um i think it's probably the best way of keeping live FAQs um in one place um and certainly as new legislation or guidance comes out um you will find information about it on there gary i just echo what tim says really it's um it's certainly been a bit of a change in landscape in the last couple of weeks um we've given sort of general information and you know the the guidance has been coming out and it's been more detailed so um keep looking at the website we will be updating it on a frequent basis as that new guidance and new details of the schemes come out thank you anything from you kate um yeah so i was just going to add obviously it's a really difficult time for everybody and um you know hopefully we've been able to answer some of your legal questions today if there are any other questions but around general policy or employee relations through this time please do continue to send them to our advice mailbox and you know we'll get to them and we'll answer them as we can we do have some information on our website around um employee well-being and considering your employees through this difficult time so also please take a look at that um and like i said any other questions that that are more around sort of how you support your employees through this difficult time please do um point them to our advice mailbox and we'll come back to you okay thank you and that's to advice at uk.coop so you can email either to advice.uk at uk.coop or membership at uk.coop and well we where we'll build a lot of these inquiries coming in if you think that actually we could do with more of these webinars and perhaps another hr webinar um please let us know we're reacting to what our members require and what our members are asking for so we've we've been quite agile in the way that we've converted all of our physical events and have now converted them online we can certainly add more as we go so if that's something that's really important to you you think you would be um subscribing to these webinars then let us know again at membership at uk.coop um you can also subscribe to our newsletter and that's a really good way of keeping up to date with the information that's been fielded out so that's um you can find that on uk.coop slash email so that's on our website just go in there and subscribe to our newsletter at uk.coop slash um email and um just make sure that you're aware of some of the other things that we're doing in terms of bringing cooperatives together so the co-op connection series of events which begins on the 7th of April in Bristol the 8th of April in London and so on um we've got a whole raft of those going on perhaps somewhere near you thankfully now you don't have to travel to those we can get more people involved in those and it's a really good way of connecting with those in your region um again we'll be guided by what our members require of those and uh we'll certainly be um available to answer some of the or at least talk about some of the challenges that you're really facing um so thank you everybody and apologies to those that we haven't managed to answer questions they are recorded we will try and get back to um as many as we possibly can and keep in touch with us and we hope everyone stays well and healthy thanks very much to everyone thanks to our panelists and to all our participants we'll see you again soon thank you bye everyone