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Unfortunately government guidelines for employers are pretty relaxed. They say employers should make every effort to ensure social distancing is maintained. For working in customer homes, I would have thought this should ensure checking in advance whether anyone in the household is or has within the last 7 days displayed symptoms of temperature or cough, asking customers to provide you access to the nearest door and a sink for handwashing, to ensure everyone stays as far as possible away from you while you are working. And providing you with gloves, wipes and alcohol hand cleanser.
If your employer is making reasonable efforts, they don’t have to pay you if you decide not to work. The exception is if you are self-isolating for up to 2 weeks due to you or someone in your household having symptoms of COVID 19, in which case they must pay you SSP (around £95 per week), which they can claim back from the government.
The government have made a bit of a blunder on this, which will create unintended consequences. Self-employed will receive support (eventually), even if they carry on working. Directors of micro-companies only qualify if they stop working completely, not great for the nation or the economy.
My wife and I are furloughed from tomorrow (formalised in writing). Our phone lines are switched through to an answerphone message, advising callers that we are closed, likely for at least the next two months, emails are being diverted to my son, who’s back on the payroll on a minimal salary. It’s a crazy situation, but in business, difficult choices have to be made.
HM treasury have confirmed that company directors can furlough themselves and will still be permitted to carry out their statutory duties, eg submitting accounts, while on furlough:
https://www.cbi.org.uk/articles/daily-coronavirus-webinar-job-retention-scheme-27-03-2020/
It’s a pragmatic solution to the constraints of the emergency scheme. Why should micro companies lose out when self-employed are taken care of? My son’s already registered as an employee as he did some development work a couple of years ago on our social media. He’s more than capable of monitoring our emails, running our RTI and processing our HMRC returns. A good opportunity to apply his sixth form studies in IT and Business, now pretty much come to a full stop. Only two customers have yet to pay and we’ve settled all our accounts other than those on direct debit, so there will be very little banking involved. For me, It’ll be a useful sabbatical.
For self-employed, the HMRC guidelines say they will contact you if you are eligible when they are ready for you to apply. They have said you will be eligible even if you carry on working, provided you have a drop in income. It remains to be seen what evidence they will require, but that might be one of the reasons they are delaying the process until June.
For those of us working through one or two employee limited companies, the self-employed support will obviously not apply. On the face of it, the Job retention scheme for companies might be applicable. However, to qualify, employees have to be “furloughed” and must do no work for the company while laid off. So the company would effectively have to close down completely, maybe relying on the company’s independent accountant to take over the admin, including taking over the bank account, paying the wages and doing all the form filling for HMRC. In my case, I don’t have an accountant, so I am considering putting my 18 year old son on the payroll to keep the company ticking over while my wife and I are furloughed.
I’ve suspended bookings for the next few months. Not an easy decision, but with a wife working for the health service, 3 kids just home from school/uni and a health condition myself, I don’t want to take any risks.
I noticed a few customers this last week seemingly trying to suppress a cough, in most cases no doubt just a regular cold, but I am sure there are those with a cavalier attitude who would do anything to get their machine fixed, infected with the virus or not.
It’s worth looking at the announcements from some of the national companies like British Gas, BSH and Miele. They are setting out very strict ground rules on the questions they will ask customers, prioritisation of customer and appliance types, social distancing on site and hand washing facilities. These are the kind of measures all of us should look to adopt, and if necessary review on a daily basis.
Oh well, link posting only seems to work at domain level, so here is the link in text:
https://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/media/1449/who-can-legally-work-on-a-gas-appliance-factsheet.pdf
The goverment’s chief scientific adviser’s reference to the importance of developing herd immunity I think betrayed the government are not trying to limit the spread of the disease, just to slow it down. Given herd immunity typically requires 90{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d} immunity. I do wonder if the team of advisors they have assembled to make these decisions are suffering from a kind of herd mentality, with no actual concept of how the nhs is going to cope with even a flatter peak in intensive care cases over the next few months. I suspect a few brains in government may not be that bothered by a reduction in our elderly and/or relatively unwell populations, given their relative burden on the taxpayer.
Strictly, a susteined wash temperature of at least 67 deg C is required to kill all germs. Luckily though, as this Coronavirus is not massively contagious and washing machine programmes take a lot longer than it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice, I think the risk of catching the virus from the drum is small. There’s more chance I think from catching it from the handles, surfaces and controls of the machine or indeed from the occasional customer who insists on shaking hands or hovering in my personal space.
I’ve been using alcohol hand cleanser after every visit for a few days now, avoided touching my face and wash my hand thoroughly before eating. Trying to get into good habits before the inevitable pandemic spreads.
Looks like an entry-level Samsung. I’ve seen motors fall off a few of these. I doubt the tub would last long with the transit bolts left in.
On the specific problem raised on this thread, later machines under revised ecodesign regulation must consume less than 0.1W iirc on standby, wheareas it used to be iirc 1W. For this reason, there are some compatibility issues with Indesit boards.
For some models, if the wrong user board/power board/comms cable combination is used, the machine will be dead. This is one reason it is advisable to check compatibility against the specific industrial code & serial number before ordering a pcb.
For this reason I have never bought modules from Qualitex – I am sure it is their loss. Connect have always taken modules back in my experience (faulty or unused). ASWO I suspect is the same (and no restocking charge with them). I don’t know the policies of Maddocks and Homespares.
Most manufacturers don’t quibble if you return after buying direct. However, Electrolux no longer take anything back unless it is faulty, and in my experience follow up customer service from them seems pretty non-existent these days.
Of a quick sample of 5 recent models I’ve come across with burnt out lock connector blocks this year, 3 are on the list, 2 are not (HE8L493GUK, WMAQC641PUK).
From my earlier post, that’s one of the missing models accounted for. I suspect the list will grow further. The cynic in me wonders if this is a deliberate plan to manage their workload.
