"We have an employee who has returned from China. We believe that the advice is that they should not attend work. Do we have to continue paying them?"

Seamus: This is all in and around this coronavirus that now has taken over the news, and I think that's probably the first point. One of the big things that employers need to do is to keep on top of this. They need to keep their information fresh. The World Health Organization has various publications and the government publications as well as to where we are at.

My understanding of the situation is that . . . wary of someone returning from China, red flags up, you need to be cautious. I can imagine a number of situations arising.

If the employee comes home and presents with no symptoms of anything whatsoever, they may say, "It's fine for me to return to work". The employer may have some hesitation about that, and you might get some kickback from your other employees in the office who say, "This person is just coming back. I have kids at home. I don't want a risk of this".

Some of the advice that I've seen and some of the guidance has been that when the employer is concerned, you can ask the employee to attend their doctor to get a statement of fitness for work. But my understanding with this particular virus is that it takes 14 days sometimes before it can show, essentially, so precautionary suspensions or something like that can be put in place.

If the employee is sick from the virus, I think your normal sick pay scheme kicks in, whether that's company sick pay or statutory sick pay, whatever way that works out.

The more interesting aspect for this might be where the employee has been travelling for work and will come back and say, "This has happened to me when I have been on a period of work. There's a responsibility for my employer to look after me in those circumstances". There are various things that can happen.

The other part of it, and what Scott had mentioned earlier on, is I think that the anticipation is that there is going to be a shortage of supplies coming from China, and that might have a knock-on effect of our ability to do jobs and work in Northern Ireland. You could be looking then at periods of layoff, and what are the entitlements in and around layoff.

For me, there's an argument that if the employee isn't fit to attend work or is precluded from attending work, there's no strict right for the employer to pay them if they can't actually come into work. The responsibility is on them to meet their contractual duties in that sense. But I think that it does become difficult, for instance, if the employee has been travelling for work.

Scott: Seamus, going back to the layoff, there are a number of companies here who operate with Chinese supplies. In fact, we could probably look around this office and every other office. You're going to find something that's come from China and such like. So you may not be able to provide the work through no fault of your own as an employer. The layoff provisions that are in statute in the '96 order will kick in.

Seamus: Yes, guaranteed payments.

Scott: Guaranteed payments. All that kind of stuff is brilliant, but you still need it in your contract to allow you to lay somebody off. Our poll showed that something like 85% of the people listening don't have a layoff clause in their contract. So they're probably stuck having to pay people or make redundancies. This is a serious thing if this spreads, because the last person I heard, anyway, in the UK that had coronavirus wasn't in China. They were somewhere else in Asia.

Seamus: I think they were in Singapore.

Scott: It's clearly spreading. So it's not just, "Oh, you've come somewhere from the east". It's pretty scary stuff for a lot of employers.

Seamus: Absolutely. We just don't know what's going to happen, but that would be the risk, that if it isn't within the contract in relation to layoff, it's going to create difficulties and problems.

A couple of other practical solutions for people are that, certainly, a lot of the guidance has suggested that you look at some sort of flexible working in relation to circumstances where the employee can't come to work. Maybe if there's a period where they're sequestered, you could look at remote access to continue to work or work from home.

Maybe sometimes people will use holidays and stay out in order to ensure that there's some consistency in relation to payments as well.

But it's developing, and we'll need to see what comes along

Seamus: You're looking at employees there that are saying, "I'm not going to drive a lorry that doesn't have MOT because there's no insurance, and if something happens to me, then there's a problem there", or where the employer says, "We can't let you work, and it's not our fault". You know what I mean?

So you are looking at the potential of layoff. It needs to be in the contract or else, alternatively, redundancy might come around. Hopefully, they're short-term problems and there are alternatives there that we can use.