Information Technology Recruitment

A History of the NHS: 70 Years On Post-War Predicament On the 2nd of September 1945 World War II came to an end. Of course it was not without its repercussions, the British public had endured a pretty serious case of being bombed, and therefore people weren’t generally very well. Along comes Aneurin Bevan who starts aggressively pursuing a massive healthcare reform, a sort of National Health Service, but the Conservative opposition were quick to try and shoot it down. They feared that if hospitals were nationally owned then they would lose the close patient-doctor relationship. The Labour government beat back these amendments and on July 5th 1948, at the Park Hospital in Manchester, the NHS was officially launched after only three years of constant arguing. The genesis of the idea really only came alive in the ‘Beveridge Report’, written by Liberal economist William Beveridge, which proposed massive social reforms, one of which was the idea for a welfare state. In the study he found that rations during the time of rationing the cases of deficiency diseases and infant mortality dropped a great deal, the conclusion to draw from this is that poorer families were actually healthier during a period of national intervention. Upon discovering this, Beveridge had a massive light bulb pop up over his head, he would advise an increase of national intervention on a huge scale. Cue Bevan; cue the first paragraph of this blog. Over the Years Not long after its introduction to British life, the NHS began innovating, and hasn’t stopped since. In the early sixties the contraceptive pill was made widely available, which proved to be a massive step in the right direction for the rights of women. Around the same sort of time they also stopped just throwing mentally ill people into asylums and forgetting about them, a treatment technique that was waning in popularity and needed very serious reform. During the seventies they mastered the power of painkillers with the discovery of endorphins, and managed to master the bone marrow transplant. With every new decade the levels of tech used within hospitals increased, with new machinery and research helping to diagnose and treat people. The following decades led to more innovations, too many to write about without just making a long list, and still the NHS kept fighting on. What’s Next? The question is; will the NHS last another 70 years? The answer; nobody knows. There are massive budget constraints in place right now, and the NHS has always suffered from being an incredibly expensive endeavour, these add up and I’m sure there are some people in government positions who want completely privatise health. I think that would be a great shame for this great public service. We shouldn’t point at its weaknesses as reasons to destroy it, we should help to fix those weaknesses and make the NHS stronger. I’ll finish this blog by stating the three core principles the NHS was founded on: i.That it meets the needs of everyone. ii.That it’s free at the point to delivery. iii.That it’s based on clinical need, not ability to pay. Here’s hoping we’re working with the NHS for another 70 years!

On Friday the Government published the long-anticipated HMRC consultation on IR35 compliance in the private sector. As you may be aware, this follows the public sector reform in April 2017, and the announcement in the November 2017 Budget. You will also be aware if you have read my previous blogs on the subject, the Government’s seemingly blinkered drive to push this through (as they did within the public sector) whilst continuing to ignore the substantial concerns aired by all stakeholders, drives me mad. HMRC estimates that an additional £410M of income tax and NICs has been remitted since April 2017. This is before they take into account the drop in both corporation tax and dividend tax receipts from all the PSCs that are deemed inside the legislation. The net gain is something nearer £100m which, while clearly is quite a lot of money, I suggest it pales into insignificance when compared to the costs incurred by the Public Sector (in time, increased rates, cost of compliance teams etc) and others in the supply chain (recruiters requiring increased compliance teams, additional payroll systems, additional payroll staff, etc etc etc). From the consultation it is clear that the Government’s preferred option is to extend off-payroll into the private sector based on the assumption that non-compliance in the sector is widespread and due, to a greater extent, to active avoidance, which needs to be addressed. The consultation suggests that the public sector reforms have been largely successful, and supports the current system for determining employment status, defending the CEST tool (this tool is indefensible!) Those of you who worked to comply last April will recall that the rules weren’t finalised until 2 weeks before the changes came into force, meaning that it was impossible for the majority of the public sector employers and workers to get to grips with the changes in time and so countless incorrect status decisions followed. And no one really understood why their take-home pay changed. You can read a previous rant here. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been directly involved with this will comprehend the time, disruption and cost that these changes have caused, and now it seems the fears of the entire flexible workforce may come true with the rules extended to the Private Sector. Where self-employed workers have been punished in the Public Sector by taxing them as employees, but with NO EMPLOYMENT BENEFITS, rather than stamping out false self-employment, this will be mirrored across the whole UK economy. The Government and HMRC seem intent on burying their heads in the sand to the fact that many workers have left multiple critical projects and that costs to the public sector have risen. And one thing never considered with these changes, is the costs to the economy in complying with the changes, which I assure you, probably make any tax gains in the Government’s coffers look small. This ‘solution’ does nothing to tackle false self-employment and merely punishes those that make this country’s flexible workforce, world-class. If the Government really wants to tackle false self-employment, it could start by creating a statutory definition of self-employment once and for all. Or, as seems to be its intent, it could create mayhem across the economy just before the UK needs all the competitive advantage it can gain as we step away from the European Union.

As many of you will be aware, there are major changes underway around the laws governing data protection in the form of GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulations. The regulations are being updated in the light of the changing world in which we live and the huge amount of data that is held or shared, much of it online. As recruiters, we take data protection very seriously and have spent months understanding and preparing for the new changes. One of these changes is ensuring we have a lawful basis for processing data and, given that GDPR is not recruitment specific, a lot of this is down to how the legislation is interpreted. Now finally, the ICO (the governing body – the Information Commissioners Office) has released a 46-page piece of guidance around one of the lawful basis that can be used, and hidden away in this guidance are a few paragraphs specific to recruitment. Many candidates post their CVs on CV databases online, such as Monster, Jobsite, CV Library etc, that many recruiters subscribe to. Most recruiters will download suitable candidates onto their own database to enable notes to be taken against the candidate regarding conversations etc. What we and most recruiters who follow The Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 do, ensuring we work in an ethical and transparent manner, is gain explicit permission from a candidate before their CV is submitted to any client. This means that our candidates always know where their CV has been sent, and always with their consent. What the ICO's advice is around CVs downloaded from CV databases is that it is in the agencies’ legitimate business interest to send the CV to clients, because the fact that it was posted on a CV database, it is ok to send it out to clients without explicit permission from the candidate. The specific wording in the guidance is “they [the candidate] would clearly expect that recruitment agencies would access the CV and share with it their clients” It remains my view that downloading the CV would be expected and is in the recruiter's legitimate interest, and this does not override the rights of the individual so is in keeping with one of the foundations of the legislation, however it remains my, and my company’s, view that a CV should not be sent to any client without the explicit consent that we have always sought, and will continue to seek. Although I don’t expect the ICO to understand the nuances of every industry sector, this simple example just highlights the complex platform that GDPR is creating, the huge room for interpretation (misinterpretation could be very expensive for a business), and the problems that many businesses (it affects ALL businesses in the UK) face in trying to comply.