Practical Legal Updates
The doom and gloom episode: continuing financial uncertainty, restructurings, redundancies & insolvencies.
1. Dealing with non-paying customers
Many measures were introduced to help businesses survive Covid, including restrictions on terminating supply of good/ services contracts with customers facing financial difficulty (Corporate Governance and Insolvency Act 2020 (CGIA)). This is still the case. What this means is that if a customer becomes insolvent, you can’t necessarily rely on your contract terms, terminate the agreement and demand payment. Many companies don’t find this out until too late.
So please contact us to discuss what practical steps you should be taking if you’re worried that a customer isn’t paying and/ or may be unable to pay.
2. Restructurings and redundancies
We’re seeing an increased number of companies restructuring and making redundancies. Tempting as it might be to DIY and save money, it’s usually a false economy because there are some common pitfalls that a quick conversation can help avoid. Let our HR Legal Counsel help by doing a risk analysis and getting a good practical plan in place so you can restructure quickly and efficiently without causing problems down the line that will take up management time and cost more.
3. Are they changing IR35 for off-payroll workers or not?!?
With many businesses having spent the last year or so going through a huge amount of pain, effort and cost to ensure compliance with the ‘new’ rules, the rules changed again last week, then changed back again this week! Can anyone keep up? Will further changes be made? Who knows?! So for now it’s business as usual, even though it was one of the few things most people thought Kwasi Kwarteng actually got right. In the meantime we suggest you continue to use the HMRC tool to help determine worker status for income tax and NI purposes. And if you need any help, please contact info@legaledge.co.uk.
4. Data Processing Agreements: 27th December Deadline
Most businesses rely on third party software to process personal data (for staff, customers, prospects, suppliers, etc). Many SaaS/ tech etc companies we work with provide this service to their customers too. And in each case, you must, by law, have a data processing agreement (DPA) covering how personal data is processed.
Where it’s processed outside the UK or EU, you need to take further steps to ensure the data is safe, which may include adding government issued ‘standard contractual clauses’ (SCCs) to your DPAs. If you are using SCCs, new ones have been published, and the deadline for using them/ updating old versions is 27th December 2022.
See our blog for more information on what you need to do and the deadlines. If you want help with this, please get in touch at info@legaledge.co.uk
We’re here to support you and your business – if you want to discuss any of the above or anything else please get in touch.
