Ten to seven on a Tuesday morning, and the site manager’s phone buzzes. One of the groundworkers — back’s gone, won’t be in. The site manager swears, reshuffles the gang, and gets on with the day. In most firms I look at, that text is the entire record of the absence. Nobody tells the office. Nothing reaches payroll. Until this April, that mostly didn’t cost anything.
It does now.
What sick pay actually is
Statutory sick pay — SSP — is the legal minimum an employer must pay an employee who is off ill. Two things about it are worth being clear on, because people get both wrong. First, it’s your money. The government sets the rate, but you pay it, out of the same account as wages, and you can’t claim it back — the scheme that once let employers recover some of the cost was abolished in 2014. Second, it’s for employees on your payroll. Your self-employed subbies don’t get it — from you or from anyone else. More on that at the end.
For years, two features of the rules quietly kept the bill down. The first three days of any sickness — the law called them “waiting days” — were unpaid, so sick pay only started on day four. And anyone earning less than a set threshold — £125 a week, most recently — got nothing at all, however long they were off.
What changed in April
On 6 April this year, both features went. Under the Employment Rights Act — the large piece of employment legislation passed last year — sick pay now runs from the first day of absence. The earnings threshold has been scrapped entirely, a change the government says brings around 1.3 million lower-paid workers into the scheme. The rate is £123.25 a week, or 80 per cent of the person’s average weekly earnings if that works out lower. That last part matters more than it looks: for anyone part-time or on variable hours, the figure has to be worked out person by person, from their actual pay over the previous eight weeks.
Here’s why the old rules mattered so much on site. Most site absence is short — a day here, two days there. Under the old rules those days were free. No money changed hands, so nobody needed to record them, so nobody did. The text to the site manager was the whole system, and the system worked, in the sense that nothing happened when it failed.
Now every one of those days is money owed. A Tuesday off with a bad back is a payment your payroll is legally required to make — and your payroll doesn’t know it happened.
The gap between the site and the payroll run
The person who knows about the absence is the site manager. The person who has to act on it sits in the office, running payroll to a Wednesday cut-off, working from timesheets that were filled in from memory. Between those two people is a text thread, a phone call that may or may not get made, and a site diary that lives in the cab of a van.
So one of two things goes wrong. Either the absence never reaches payroll and the man gets paid as normal — which sounds generous until you multiply it across a workforce and a year. Or it arrives late and gets worked out wrong, and someone underpays sick pay without meaning to. Underpaying isn’t a paperwork slip; it’s the sort of thing employment tribunals exist for. And there is now a body whose job is to look. The Fair Work Agency — a new government enforcement arm — opened in April, and sick pay is on the list of things it will police.
The fix is small, and it isn’t an HR platform
This is not an argument for buying a ten-module HR suite. The fix is one boring piece of plumbing: absence gets recorded once, at the point where it’s already known, and flows to the place that pays. If your site managers already allocate labour on a Monday — on a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, a planner — that’s where a sick day should be marked, in about four seconds, from a phone. From there it should land in front of payroll without anyone retyping it, alongside the one calculation the new rules make fiddly: that 80 per cent figure, worked out from pay history the system already holds.
Done that way, you get two things. Sick pay that’s right without anyone doing arithmetic on a Wednesday afternoon. And — the part that pays for itself — a true picture of absence. Which jobs lost days. Which weeks got hit. What sickness actually costs you, as a number you can read, instead of a feeling the site managers have.
Where this doesn’t apply
If your labour is nearly all self-employed — subbies invoicing you for days worked — this change barely touches you. Sick pay is for employees, and a subbie off with a bad back is simply a subbie you don’t pay that day. Whether it’s a good thing that so much of the industry works with no safety net at all is a different conversation. Equally, if you already pay full wages from the first day of sickness — some firms do, as policy — the money isn’t new, though you still need the absence recorded to know what that policy costs you. And if you’re a ten-person firm where the office manager hears about every absence by nine and runs the payroll herself, a diary is a perfectly good system. Don’t buy software to solve a problem you don’t have.
But if you run directly employed gangs across several sites, and the honest answer to “how many sick days did we pay for last month?” is a shrug, then the rules have moved and your records haven’t. Worth an hour of your time before the new enforcement body finds its feet. Get in touch.