Christine:  And with a company loan, you've mentioned that a couple of times, how would you go about managing that? You're going to need paperwork to back this up. It's going to be a deduction from wages in reality, isn't it?

Seamus:  It is, yeah. Look, some employers, some of those large companies, certainly banks and financial institutions, will automatically offer employees loans, and there can be good benefit for it.

What we're looking at really here, though, is in relation to employees coming to say, "Look, my car is broken down", or, "I need to fix the heating in the house. Can I get a loan?" I think in those circumstances, it's always best to look at ratios in relation to the loan. I think that you should be making sure that there's a balance of how much the loan is versus what the monthly salary is or the yearly salary, versus what the repayment period is going to be, and then taking into account any notice period that the employee has to provide.

And I'm thinking more along the lines of protection for the employer so that the employer is not left high and dry if an employee chooses to leave. I've certainly had situations where an employer will withhold or start to withhold salary if there are loans that are owed coming towards the end of a notice period, where an employee has decided that they're going to leave. So you don't want to have a huge, big loan that you're never going to be able to recover, and you're going end up in difficulties having to get it back.

But you're absolutely right. The terms of the loan need to be clearly set out in writing, and the employee needs to be particularly clear about the impact of the loan, how it's going to be deducted, when it will be deducted, and what happens if they come to a point where they're leaving and it needs to be repaid.

It's similar to those covenants that you would see in contracts, in the terms where the employer has facilitated training or paid for part of an educational course subject to the employee staying on for a certain period of time. Those always lead to difficult conversations, and there can be a lot of fallout around it. So that's why you need to have it set out particularly in writing, so that both parties know where they stand when it comes to the loan.

The other aspect, I think, with loans that you need to be careful about is that if you are deducting from salary during the month, you're not falling below the minimum wage.

I certainly have cases in the past where HMRC have contacted clients after inspections and have had concerns around where there have been deductions for loans or further matters where the hourly rate falls below the minimum wage. So you just want to make sure that for your lower-end paid employees that you're not doing anything that's going to put them into difficulty or put you into difficulty where you're going to end up with a penalty by Revenue & Customs.

But the other thing is from a tax perspective, they can be efficient as well in relation to loans. And again, I think if you had some aspect of maybe financial advice being provided to the employees, that would assist.