Employee purchase programme?

[Primus]

I think you will find if you check with your HR or a lawyer that my interpretation is correct and yours is not.

 

I will leave it there.

[paulkerton]

There is no difference between job share and part time staff - in the eyes of the law they are part time staff.

 

The law literally says you cannot treat part time workers less favourably than full time workers - that's not my interpretation, that is the law.

 

The legislation is The Part-Time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations (2000) if you want to look it up.

 

5.—(1) A part-time worker has the right not to be treated by his employer less favourably than the employer treats a comparable full-time worker—(a)as regards the terms of his contract; or(b)by being subjected to any other detriment by any act, or deliberate failure to act, of his employer.(2) The right conferred by paragraph (1) applies only if—(a)the treatment is on the ground that the worker is a part-time worker, and(b)the treatment is not justified on objective grounds.

 

Which means, that if you give all your full time employees 40 days holidays, you must pro-rata that. If you expect full time employees to be on call for 40 days a year, you must pro-rata that for part-time and fixed term employees. You can't expect full-time employees to be on call for 50 days a year, and someone who works a day a week to be on call for 40.

 

It's about the contractual rights of the worker, and unless their job requires them to work from home (which as much as teachers do work from home, there is no requirement to do so) then the taking home of devices issued based on the fact they're full time (so can't share it in work) and part-time (so could) is absolutely justified on objective grounds.

 

An example I've seen that covers this:

An example of objective justification may be where a fixed-term employee is on a contract of three months and a comparator has a company car. You may decide not to offer the car if the cost of doing so is high and the need of the business for your employee to travel can be met in some other way.

If they need to work from home, and you can meet those needs in another way without issuing them the same value laptop as a full-time employee (such as via cloud services on their own devices, or a cheaper device) then you can clearly do that.The other way to cover it, is to say "no-one can take devices home" but, best of luck with trying that.You also have the fact that support staff will be on different terms and conditions to teaching staff to contend with too. Pretty sure I'm not in the same pension scheme!

I think you will find if you check with your HR or a lawyer that my interpretation is correct and yours is not.

I will leave it there.

 

I've checked with my HR expert father, and you're not.

Edited May 21, 2020 by paulkerton

[Primus]

Which means, that if you give all your full time employees 40 days holidays, you must pro-rata that. If you expect full time employees to be on call for 40 days a year, you must pro-rata that for part-time and fixed term employees. You can't expect full-time employees to be on call for 50 days a year, and someone who works a day a week to be on call for 40.

 

It's about the contractual rights of the worker, and unless their job requires them to work from home (which as much as teachers do work from home, there is no requirement to do so) then the taking home of devices issued based on the fact they're full time (so can't share it in work) and part-time (so could) is absolutely justified on objective grounds.

 

An example I've seen that covers this:

An example of objective justification may be where a fixed-term employee is on a contract of three months and a comparator has a company car. You may decide not to offer the car if the cost of doing so is high and the need of the business for your employee to travel can be met in some other way.

If they need to work from home, and you can meet those needs in another way without issuing them the same value laptop as a full-time employee (such as via cloud services on their own devices, or a cheaper device) then you can clearly do that.The other way to cover it, is to say "no-one can take devices home" but, best of luck with trying that.You also have the fact that support staff will be on different terms and conditions to teaching staff to contend with too. Pretty sure I'm not in the same pension scheme!

 

I've checked with my HR expert father, and you're not.

 

Cool story. Lucky you had such expertise in your family isn’t it.

[paulkerton]

Cool story. Lucky you had such expertise in your family isn’t it.

Funny enough it was. He's been great when I've had problems that the union were taking too long to solve so I had him to check legislation and get back to me on.

Worked with a massive council too, till his recent retirement.

 

But it was handy to have such expertise rather than throwing the legislation at people that I'd clearly read wrong and insisting I was correct.

[Primus]

So, let's get this straight:

 

In the scenario given you give all full time staff laptops to take home to work on at home, but part time staff either don't get a laptop or they get a lower spec laptop.

 

How could that not be treating them less favourably? If they get no laptop at all but fulltime staff do how could you justify it? If they get a lower specification laptop again what's the justification for doing it.

 

Your previous example talked about not giving them a company car if there was an another method of transport available because of the cost - you're comparing apples with oranges - a £300 laptop against a £30,000 car.

 

Yes since all I'd done was briefly read the legislation, it's not like my post nominals include LL.B (Hons.) is it?

[paulkerton]

So, let's get this straight:

In the scenario given you give all full time staff laptops to take home to work on at home, but part time staff either don't get a laptop or they get a lower spec laptop.

 

They can choose to take it home as it is assigned purely to them as they work full-time and there is no option to share the device, but they are not required to - and it is not contractually stipulated that they have to work from home and get a laptop to do so. In fact, you could contractually stipulate that your part-time workers are NOT required to work from home. They can also only use it for work purposes. There are no allowances for personal logins.

 

I also don't buy everyone a brand new device because we have a tranch of new staff who get a 2020 model, so everyone gets the 2020 model.

How could that not be treating them less favourably? If they get no laptop at all but fulltime staff do how could you justify it? If they get a lower specification laptop again what's the justification for doing it.

But they get access to a device to do their job, There are pools of laptops available for them to use in order to do their job, or desktops dotted around in staff rooms.

If they get their own assigned device, then they get a device that is specced appropriately to the job they are expected to do.

 

If you have someone on a job share, do they share equipment or do they all get their own PC and their own desk? This really isn't rocket science.

Your previous example talked about not giving them a company car if there was an another method of transport available because of the cost - you're comparing apples with oranges - a £300 laptop against a £30,000 car.

 

No you're not. Cost is cost. I can't justify spending £800 on a machine for someone who works 2 days a week compared to someone who works 5 days a week because it will only get 40% of the utilisation compared, so it is entirely reasonable for me to look at a cost of around £320 for that person within reason depending on case use.

 

So like I said before, because someone who teaches engineering gets a Core i7 with 16GB RAM and an RTX 20 Series GPU, does everyone get one? Does the part-time office team get an overpowered machine? Do I replace every single device in the school because I've ran out of stock and now need to buy a new specification of laptop?

If I'm trialling out the use of tablets in one department, do I have to get everyone a tablet?

 

No of course none of that happens.

Yes since all I'd done was briefly read the legislation, it's not like my post nominals include LL.B (Hons.) is it?

Like you said, cool story.

[Primus]

Guess we’ll agree to disagree then...

[MatthewL]

Going to ask the obvious question here but seems to have been over looked.

 

For me an employee purchase programme allows said employee to purchase items such as laptops or other things for use at home, spread the cost and reduce the tax paid. Similar to the bike schemes, they were popular in the 2000's with hardware, TV's you name it.

 

There seems to be a bit of confusion from what I can see in this thread, are you expecting staff to purchase a laptop through this for work purposes or is it for them to use at home and for them to do what they want?

[altecsole]

Going to ask the obvious question here but seems to have been over looked.

 

For me an employee purchase programme allows said employee to purchase items such as laptops or other things for use at home, spread the cost and reduce the tax paid. Similar to the bike schemes, they were popular in the 2000's with hardware, TV's you name it.

 

There seems to be a bit of confusion from what I can see in this thread, are you expecting staff to purchase a laptop through this for work purposes or is it for them to use at home and for them to do what they want?

 

It's not my expectation; I've just been asked to investigate hardware purchase schemes. As you say, they used to be fairly common, but I'm struggling to find any.

 

As for my full-time/part-time staff priority remark; what I meant was that, if we have a pool of laptops to choose from, the best ones will go to the full-time staff and, of those, the best of those will go to a head of department, or SLT. What we do find, is that someone who works full-time, drops to say 3 days per week and we then have to find another laptop for the person we employ to cover the other two days. There would be no expectation that the laptop would be shared between them.

[bobsmith]

As much fun as playing lawyer is for some of us, the wood is being lost amongst the trees somewhat.

 

In real terms laptops are dirt cheap - during the covid crisis we simply offered laptops to any member of staff who would actually need to get online during the shutdown for work purposes - so cleaners didn't get laptops but office staff and teachers did.

 

We've even loaned laptops to long term supply teachers.

 

It's simply not worth the hassle of getting into part time/full time/agency/permanent arguements. You can get crappy but brand new AMD powered laptops for £200 a pop.

 

Many teachers didn't bother because they've got their own equipment and they're saving a fortune in time and petrol working from home.

 

As for the very original purpose of this post - hardware purchase schemes - Personally I think they are out of date - they were dreamed up when many teachers didn't have any IT access at home - in the days when home internet often made a noise and took over your phone line (56k dialup anyone??). It'll cost more to administrate than simply buying them outright. (ok not in total but you know what I mean) You could simply give them a IT equipment allowance (like a clothing allowance in some businesses).