heathcote wrote:
All private hire operators should be reconsidering their employment practices regarding these so called self employed private hire proprietor, it is only a matter of time someone knocks on their door asking for his/her holiday pay and their minimum wage payments.
It isn't cheap to be an employer. Unless you know exactly what you are doing there are many pitfalls. We used to have a very basic contract of employment but we realised that there were many issues with it so we brought in a human resources company to take care of this for us. We now have very comprehensive contracts that protect both the staff and the company. They also take care of such things as training for staff on aspects of their job that most people would not think of. But by providing this training we are legally covered should things go wrong. We have an online payroll system which does all the calculations of wages, holiday pay and pensions. And then there is the actual pension scheme where we have to keep the staff updated on things that happen with the scheme. Fortunately, we do not have to pay employers National Insurance because the Government give us a £4,000 annual allowance for this. This means that we can't claim back sick pay etc. under normal circumstances. We obviously have to contribute 3% of employees earnings to the pension and the employees contribute 5% of their wages. Not forgetting that we have to account for VAT on every fare.
Having said all that, at least if we get the knock on the door we are in the clear and can sleep at night and once set up it doesn't take much time to run the payroll system.