mayalld

One imagines that whilst the sale of the non-approved version will be banned, it might be possible to buy replacement parts for the non-approved version? That could mean that some NORTY people convert approved stoves into useful stoves....

I am not wealthy! As I have said, PROVIDING THIS IS TRULY VOLUNTARY.... And in actual fact, the employee is very literally incapable of doing the NI trick without the employer's help.

I know, I'm such a BAD man. There's me saying that a scheme that puts extra money into the pocket of people on the minimum wage isn't actually that bad a thing. What a bastard I am. Thank God the low paid have you to fight their corner, and ensure that nobody puts in place a scheme that might do that for them. You may (or, in fact, may not) be correct as to whether this is a technical breach of MW legislation, but are you really so blinded by the ideology that you can't see that this is beneficial to the participants.

Well that's good then. Iceland must be stopped from doing something that employees can opt into and which results in more money in their pockets for Christmas. Instead, these employees can sign up for a hamper savings scheme elsewhere that will be poor value for money, may well go bump, and won't pay interest either. HMRC will get some more money, and the employees will have less, but this will be a great victory for the rights of the low paid. Don't you just love it when ideological purity takes precedence over what is best for those that the ideology is supposed to be about.

I haven't ignored the post. I have simply given due weight to a single post here, against the fact that not one media report of this case has suggested that this is anything other than truly voluntary. As I have already said, should that be shown not to be the case, I would revise my whole view of the scheme. Your arguments around Iceland paying interest and Iceland offering interest free loans seem to derive from a dogmatic approach to employer/employee relationships. Under that approach, it isn't enough that an arrangement benefits the employee. It must also cost the employer. An arrangement that benefits the employee but also benefits the employer is to be criticised, and the employer must be made to make it better until it does actually cost them. The employee must gain ALL the benefit from the arrangement. I also feel that I addressed the question of wage rates. If you have a minimum wage, then some people will, inevitably be paid at that level. There will always be jobs where there is an ample pool of resource that can do the job, such that employers have no need to pay more than the minimum to attract staff.

If you can show evidence that this is other than voluntary, whether administratively difficult to opt out of or that those who opt out are treated less favourably, then I will gladly support your assertion that Iceland are Bastards. In the absence of any evidence to that effect, your use of quotes around 'voluntary' is just ideological mud slinging (Iceland are the employer, so they must be bastards). Clearly Iceland are not going to pay interest on the money, because to do so would shatter the premise that this is just deferred pay, and HMRC would surely win then. However, as I said previously, as between Iceland and the employee voluntarily participating, this is not a zero sum game. Both parties win. Iceland benefit from an interest free loan, the employee benefits from reduced NI contributions. The only loser is the taxman, and HMRC are distinctly not keen on being the loser in any game, which is fair enough. heir role is to collect taxes, not to sit there and watch whilst people find clever ways to avoid doing so. We repeatedly hear that HMRC needs to clamp down on tax avoidance, because it is a bigger problem than benefit fraud, and in truth that is what they are doing here, proving that even the poor can engage in tax avoidance schemes. What is, to my mind disingenuous is that somebody has obviously realised that clamping down on tax avoidance by people on low wages wont play well. The socialists may talk abut stopping tax avoidance, but they only want the rich to be targeted. Instead, the assault on this scheme has been rather cynically dressed up as protecting the low paid from unscrupulous employers, when the actual object is for HMRC to take a bit more money from those low paid employees.

You have missed something! If an employee at Iceland works 1,500 hours, they will be paid at least £11,745. They can either have that NOW, in their weekly or monthly pay, or they can opt to have it later in the year. Whichever way they choose to do it, they are being paid the same Gross Pay. Even if you have a predisposition to believe that employers who pay close to minimum wage are the spawn of Satan, you should try to look objectively. What is actually happening here is that low paid workers are getting access to the same thing that management get with deflated pay plus an annual bonus to save on NI. HMRC are trying to use the Minimum wage as the hook to stop this under the guise of protecting the low paid. The irony is that if they win, the staff will be poorer and HMRC richer.

Yes, it is of course preferable that people earn more than the minimum wage, but you can't really have a minimum wage then criticise people for paying some staff at that level

OK, let us look at it on the basis that this is (as some have claimed, and it is plausible, because that is the only way that I can see minimum wage action working) a gross savings scheme. You assert that the scheme sucks, but does it in fact have all the attributes of a Dyson Bagless, and does it suck more or less for the three interested parties (Iceland, the employee and HMG) Well, clearly from the POV of HMG it sucks, because it has the potential to reduce the NI take, and HMG won't like that. It also means that low paid people are in a savings scheme that is fairly inflexible, which may lead to them saving in a week when they can't afford it, which has consequences that may cost HMG money. On that count, it isn't appreciably different to the perils of hamper savings schemes or buying stuff from catalogues. From the POV of Iceland, apart from the unwelcome litigation, it seems an OK kind of thing as they get to use employee wages as working capital. The critical one is "Does it majorly suck from an employee POV?" And the answer to that is..... No, it doesn't seem to. The deferred pay brings National Insurance advantages, which result in the employee getting more money in their pocket when they draw it down. They will almost certainly get more extra money in NI savings than they could have got by sticking it in the bank. There is a slight risk involved with employers going belly-up, but with a gross scheme (unlike a net scheme) the money is not savings, it is wages owed, so in any liquidation would be a preferred creditor.

It isn't troublesome. It's just teasing another forum member who can take the joshing, and can hand it out in equal measure. It isn't even as if anybody mentioned the best way to operate a moveable bridge.

I started as a COBOL A/P in 1990 and spent many a happy hour trying to unpick ancient code that contained many abominations (77-level and ALTER GOTO, along with some seriously shonky internal sorts and overloads)

Well, you wouldn't have said twenty-nought-nought anyway, because that doesn't fit the pattern 1900 wasn't nineteen-nought-nought, it was nineteen-hundred 1901 wasn't nineteen-nought-one, it was nineteen-oh-one The regular English way of saying a year is a contraction, missing out the words "hundred and", so for 1999 we contracted nineteen hundred and ninety nine to nineteen-ninety-nine. The trouble comes where you can't perform the contraction without ending up with something really odd sounding, and you are faced with keeping the archaic sounding bit in. So, in most cases, centuries have to be X-hundred, because there just isn't a better alternative. as centuries divisible by 1000 there is a better alternative, so it gets used. The decade after a century is slightly complicated, because in some cases you can cause ambiguity, so you either need to retain the special form used for the century year or use a form which enunciates the zero as "oh". It seems that where this involves the archaic "hundred", the "oh" form is favoured over the hundred form, but where the century year didn't use hundred, the oh form is less favoured. So; 1903 was said as nineteen-oh-three or nineteen-hundred-and-three, with nineteen-oh-three more popular 2003 was said as twenty-oh-three or two-thousand-and-three, with two-thousand-and-three more popular Therefore, I postulate that the rule for naming ALL years is; If the year is less than 1000, prefix the expression with "the year" If the year ends in a value from 10 to 99, say the number of hundreds (if any), followed by the normal expression for the final digits If the year ends in a value from 01 to 09; If the year mod 100 is divisible by a thousand, say the number of thousands, followed by the word "thousand and n" If the year mod 100 is not divisible by a thousand, say the number of hundreds, followed by "oh n" If the year ends in 00; If the year is divisible by a thousand, say the number of thousands, followed by the word "thousand" If the year is not divisible by a thousand, say the number of hundreds, followed by "hundred" According to that rule, we should have had Two-Thousand-and-nine then Twenty-ten, and it is now Twenty-nineteen Seems to work to produce a non-clumsy name for every year. You do realise that this is the kind of thing systems analysts really have to think about don't you?

It is. If one reads the works of Jane Austen, one sees its now obsolete cousin sennight

If this is done as a gross deduction, then it won't affect the PAYE due, but it could very well affect the NI. Basically, tax is calculated over the course of the whole year, and any ups and downs even themselves out. NI is done on a per payment basis, and there is a minimum value below which no NI is due, and a value above which a very low percentage NI is due. So, it is possible (in the extreme case) to pay somebody 51 payments of (say) £161 (which would attract no NI, then a single payment of £19,000 in the final week, on which you would pay NI of around £450 If you divided the £27,211 equally over the whole year you would pay NI of £2,250 That's £1,800 saved

If they are setting aside from gross pay ten I would agree. If they are setting aside from net, then what is the issue?