Apprentice - Hair Salon

pamh58

We would greatly appreciate your advice on the apprentice we have in our hairdressing salon.

We employed our apprentice at 17 years old to do in-house training as my business partner has the appropriate qualification to do so.

She is contracted to do a two year course, which prior to lock-down would of ended in November 2020.

As we have been on "lock-down" we have struggled to find out about furlough in her case. We have made a payment to her equivalent to one month salary.

She does not have to pay Tax and NIC, therefore we never set up PAYE. Seemingly now, on looking on Gov.UK we cant go any further as we are not registered for PAYE online.

On investigation we believe we should have registered PAYE online to enable the government contributions for her NIC.

Can you please help us with some advise on this.

We have been following you online and on television, hoping this subject would crop up.

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Jeremy535897

Please note that Martin does not deal with posts to these forums.

If you do not have a HMRC registered payroll, you cannot claim for 80% of her wages under the job retention scheme, so you cannot furlough her. You may have qualified for the £10,000 small business grant and/or the self employed grant. If you qualified for neither, you might be eligible for the discretionary top-up grant from councils (see https://www.gov.uk/government/news/top-up-to-local-business-grant-funds-scheme ). You might also apply for a bounce back loan.

You need to comply with the terms of her apprenticeship agreement regarding her pay. See https://www.gov.uk/take-on-an-apprentice

When all your employees earn under the lower earnings limit, currently £120 a week, and have no other job, you do not need a payroll registered with HMRC. If you pay her £120 a week or more but under £183 a week, she will have no NIC liability, but you should operate a HMRC registered payroll to record her earnings for contribution purposes. I think I am just confirming what you have found out for yourselves.