Construction Sector Employment – Requires Planning, Building And Maintenance

An employer in the construction industry should treat its employee relationships as it would a building project: the contract must be designed to specification, the foundations laid, walls built and each relationship then maintained to avoid damage and the need for restoration.

In order to lay the right foundations for each employment relationship, the challenge for infrastructure firms is to consistently follow a fair and transparent recruitment process. By way of example (and in what is a not an uncommon issue for a stereotypically male dominated industry), employers must take care to avoid any allegations of sex discrimination. In such circumstances, liability can be created anywhere in the process: from the language and imagery of job advertisements through to an inadvertently leading question at interview. Although, at this stage, individuals are not yet employees, they can still bring discrimination claims if they believe they were treated less favourably because of their sex (or other protected characteristics such as age, disability, race, religion or sexual orientation) during the recruitment process.

Self employment in the construction sector

Contracts of employment and engagement are the walls underpinning each individual worker relationship. However, just because a contract labels an individual as an independent contractor does not necessarily make it so for employment and tax purposes. In the current market, there are an unusually high number of self-employed individuals working in the construction industry - the benefit of this self-employment being reduced National Insurance contributions (NIC's) for employers and NIC and income tax savings for employees. However, for a number of years, HMRC have been concerned about the number of cases of "false self-employment" within the industry, particularly through the use of on-shore employment intermediaries. New laws came into effect in April 2014 to seek to tackle this issue by making the intermediary responsible for accounting for tax and NICs. Further reporting requirements are slated to be introduced later this year which will make it more difficult still for employers on the one side, and individuals and their own intermediary companies on the other, to cheat the system. The challenge for employers will therefore be satisfying HMRC as to the bona fides of the status of their independent contractors or, in the alternative, offering sufficient remuneration so as to encourage...