A new guide to the increasingly important topic of social enterprise has been published for professionals working in local government.

‘The Social Enterprise Guide: For people in local government’ has been written for senior managers, directors and heads of service lines, commissioners, heads of procurement or economic development, and regeneration managers.

The guide explains how social enterprises can help meet local authorities’ strategic objectives, and gives practical advice about how to engage, procure and commission from social enterprises.

The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) is developing a website that will help people to make choices about care. It will cover all types of care and support including regulated and unregulated services in England and will go live this summer.

FindMeGoodCare.co.uk will help providers of all sizes to promote their services.

It can also help councils to provide information to their local residents in a cost-effective way. The site will include a searchable directory of services, a guide to choosing and paying for care and an interactive guide about options and choices regarding all adults care and support services.

Our legal expert supplies some guidance on pay and employment terms:

Guidance from Business Link and Direct.gov on when interns and people on placements or work experience are entitled to minimum wage.

A case illustrating the importance of being clear in contracts of employment about overtime arrangements and pay.

Allowed earnings from permitted work (for people on employment support allowance and incapacity benefit) now £97.50 p.w. (since October).

Roots HR a community interest company is offering its ‘ADAPT’ service which you can provide to your employees to support them in their next move after redundancy.

These type of “outplacement services”, fully tailored to civil society organizations, are evidenced to improve morale, motivation and productivity during times of changes and enable line managers to make changes with a clearer conscience and less stress.

Given that budgets are very tight Roots HR offers packages which start from £150 +VAT per employee.

See http://www.rootshr.org.uk/

From 1 January 2012 charities and other voluntary organisations are no longer exempt from needing a PPL licence if they play recorded music, even as background music or on the radio or TV.

There are new joint arrangement for community buildings and a consultation on community sports clubs which runs until 6 March 2012.

See www.sandy-a.co.uk/managing.htm#ppl-prs

On the council website there are now two reports showing how the council is meeting national equalities duties. These reports are about the council as an employer and as a service provider and are available on the Equality and Diversity pages of our website under ‘public sector equality duties’

The report about the council as an employer shows the make up of the workforce and the things being done to support its diverse workforce and the second report looks at the council as a service provider and covers the things being done to make sure services are provided fairly.

For employers with fewer than 50 workers, the start of pensions auto-enrolment is being postponed from April 2014 to May 2015. Learn more

From 6 April, it will no longer be possible for employees with certain types of pension to be “contracted out” of additional state pension. Learn more

Changes in state pension age. Learn more

Thousands of people have your email address and you may have thousands of email addresses, but:

• Did you ever give your email address to those people?
• Did you give someone else permission to share it?
• Have you got permission to share other peoples email addresses?

Probably not.

When email addresses are put in the To: field of an email, they are immediately visible to everyone on that circulation list and sometimes automatically stored in your email address book.

You could be in breach of the data protection act if you do this, but there is a simple solution, use the Bcc: field, like this:

The recipients then only see their own address or ‘undisclosed recipients’

An Alternative

If you are a regular sender of bulk emails, you might want to consider email services like the one used by SUSTAiN. We use and recommend MailChimp, it is secure, easy to use and has a free version that’s suitable for most users. We are not sponsored by MailChimp, we just really like it.

Source: read this Guardian article on email and data protection

Legal updates on data protection and freedom of information. More info available by clicking the links below.

• Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) will not be extended to cover all charities, or all charities providing services on behalf of public bodies, in England and Wales
• Disclosure of personal data in freedom of information and environmental information requests.
• Using the Audit Commission Act 1998 to obtain information from local authorities.
• NCVO guide on using the FOIA for campaigning
  

There is also a data protection issue with the way many people – especially in the public sector – send bulk emails.

See our special feature on this – Don’t Expose Me

Our legal expert has sent some updates – click on the links below for more information:

Tax and national insurance rates and thresholds for 2012-13.

Increased allowances for tax-free mileage reimbursement, and volunteers now eligible for ‘passenger payments’

36 tax reliefs to be abolished from April 2013.

Updated HMRC guide on tax and NI treatment of employer-supported childcare and vouchers.

“Real time” PAYE information to be introduced from 2013