Now that the manifestos for the election are coming in thick and fast, our Payroll team have summarised the potential impacts to payroll.
So what’s in each party’s proposals?
Labour
- No increase to National Insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of Income Tax
- Abolish non-dom status once and for all, replacing it with a modern scheme
- Ban exploitative zero hours contracts
- Ending fire and rehire
- Introducing basic rights from day one to parental leave, sick pay
- Protection from unfair dismissal
- Ensuring the minimum wage is a genuine living wage
- Removal of discriminatory age bands, so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage
Conservatives
- Cut national insurance by a further 2p reducing the rate from 8% to 6% by April 2027.
- No rise to income tax.
- Increasing the national living wage each year.
Liberal Democrats
- Raising the tax-free personal allowance.
- Review of the off-payroll working IR35 reform to ensure self-employed people are treated fairly
- Tackle the late payments crisis by requiring all government agencies, contractors, and companies with more than 250 employees, to sign up to the prompt payment code, making it enforceable.
- Elimination of the apprenticeship rate of pay to guarantee they are paid at least the minimum wage.
- Creating a new ‘dependent contractor’ employment status which is between employment and self-employment. This will ensure entitlements to basic rights such as minimum earnings levels, sick pay and holiday entitlement
- 20% higher minimum wage for people on zero hour contacts to compensate for uncertainty of fluctuating hours.
- Make statutory sick pay (SSP) available to workers earnings less than £123 per week
- Aligning SSP with the national minimum wage and ensuring this is available from day 1 of sickness, not day 4.
- Give parents more flexibility when going on parental leave by: making all parental pay and leave day-one rights, including for adoptive parents and kinship carers, and extending them to self-employed parents; double SMP and SHPP to £350 a week; increase paternity leave to 90% of earnings but capped for high earners; introduce an extra use-it-or-lose-it month for partners, paid at 90% of earnings but capped for high earners.
- When public finances allow, give all families six weeks use-it-or-lose-it for each parent, paid at 90% of earnings and 46 weeks of parental leave to share between themselves as they choose, paid at double the current statutory rate.
- Introduce paid neonatal care leave.
The Green Party
- Eliminate unpaid internships so that young people are guaranteed proper pay.
- Call for the revision of the Work Life Balance Directive and the Maternity Leave Directive to advance towards fully paid maternity and paternity leave of equal length, in line with SDGs 8 and 10.
- Fight for equal pay for equal work, and equal opportunities for all at work.
- Seek to introduce a minimum wage of £15 an hour for all, no matter your age.
- Increase employment allowance by £10,000
- Aims to create a 4 day working week for all.
Should you wish to discuss payroll please contact Claire Proctor at Claire.proctor@ct.me or call 0131 558 5800.
