Sick Pay Guide for Employers

Are you liable to pay employer’s Class 1 NICs on your employee’s earnings?

Employee working outside UK on first day of PIW

Employees who work outside the UK on the first day of a PIW may be entitled to SSP if you are liable to pay employer’s Class 1 NICs, or would be if the employee’s earnings were high enough.

To qualify to get SSP from you an employee must have AWE of at least £90.00 in the eight weeks before the first day they are first off work sick. See AWE Tables.

If your employee’s PIW or linked PIW continues but your liability to pay employer’s Class 1 NICs ceases, the employee is still entitled to SSP until their entitlement stops for another reason, for example they have had 28 weeks’ SSP or have become fit for work.

Change of employer

If you take over a business or part of a business and the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) (TUPE) Regulations 2006 apply, then continuity of employment is not broken.

The regulations apply when you take over an economic entity (a business, part of a business or a service provision) and take over the contracts of employment of the employees being transferred with the business. The employee liability information which the transferring employer must provide will give the identities of those employees being transferred with the business.

If you are not sure if the TUPE Regulations 2006 apply contact the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) (go to www.Acas.org.uk or call 08457 474 747). In Northern Ireland contact the Labour Relations Agency (LRA) for more information or go to www.lra.org.uk

Continuity of employment is also not broken when:

• one corporate body takes over from another as the employer by or under an Act of Parliament
• the employer dies and their personal representative or trustees keep the employee on
• there is a change in the partners, personal representatives or trustees of a business
• the employee moves from one employer to another and at the time of the move the two employers are associated, for example
• one is controlled by the other either directly or indirectly, or
• both companies are controlled by the same third party, either directly or indirectly
• a teacher in a school maintained by a local education authority, moves to another school maintained by the same authority, including maintained schools where the governors of the school, rather than the local education authority, are the teacher’s employer.

If you take over a business during the set period you must still add together all their earnings in the set period even where some of them were paid by the previous employer.

If the employee was getting SSP at the time you took over the business you must carry on paying it until the PIW ends.