The perfect time for a Spring clean of your contracts and privacy notices!

We were thrilled to see the positive news that, in a recent survey, around 56 per cent of employers surveyed plan to take on new staff during the first three months of 2021. A link to the full CIPD survey is here.

If that applies to you, or if taking on new recruits is in the pipeline for later in the year, now is the perfect to time to do some ‘spring cleaning’ to make sure that your standard terms of employment and privacy notices are up to date and, importantly, compliant with the law.

Standard Terms of Employment

Since 6 April 2020, written terms of employment for all new starters need to contain additional information about:

• whether there is a probationary period and any conditions that apply during that period;
• the individual’s normal days and hours of work (and any variation to those);
• overseas work and any particulars relating to the individual’s time abroad;
• any contractual and/or discretionary benefits that the individual is entitled to;
• the individual’s rights to paid leave; and
• any compulsory training.

Where there are no such entitlements you must make that clear in the contract.

You should also bear in mind that:

• contracts must be provided to all workers, as well as employees, no matter how long they will be working for, subject to meeting certain eligibility criteria; and
• most of the details will need to be given in a single contract before the individual starts work (rather than within the first two months, as was the case before 6 April 2020);

Privacy Notices

The UK GDPR requires employers (and prospective employers) to provide to all staff and job applicants a privacy notice.

In a nutshell, the purpose of a privacy notice is to let an individual know what kind of personal data the employer holds about them, how it will be used and why. At the recruitment stage, we recommend that you provide a short-form privacy notice to candidates, which relates solely to the processing of their personal data during that process.

The privacy notice should be provided to an individual at the time that personal data is collected. In practice, for candidates, this would be be upon receipt of a job application form or perhaps a CV; for employees / workers, this is likely to be at the end of the recruitment stage, ahead of the onboarding process.

We can help you to update your template contracts and privacy notices to make sure they’re legally compliant – please do get in touch.