Rolanda: Okay, just moving on from redundancy, we had a question come in during the week. I think it would be a nice quick one,

"We have an employee who works in Northern Ireland but lives in the Republic of Ireland. Are we okay to assume they are entitled to statutory and maternity pay, if they qualify, based on service, etc.? And are we okay to accept a maternity confirmation from a Republic-filing GP rather than an NI, so not an MAT B1, but something else?"

Seamus: This happens regularly enough, particularly around sort of border regions and things like that as well. I know that there's a lot of people that will travel in, and they live, say, maybe in ROI, but they're working here. The bottom line is, from a strict legal point of view, it's generally the member state when we're talking about Europe, in which you're working, which pays your maternity benefits. So if you're working in the UK, it comes from your employer in the UK.

The problem will always be then that if your GP is in ROI, the form will look slightly different, but I would assume the information on the form will be very much the same. If a general practitioner confirms that you're pregnant, you're pregnant. Congratulations. I think that you have to take that on face value. It might look dissimilar to our normal form, but a quick Google will show you the form in ROI.

I think that you would be running into problems there if you would start to dispute that with the employee, unnecessarily. As we always say during these talks, "There's always the issue of presentation and communication with staff." And if we look at a lot of these issues, particularly around redundancies and things like that, the retirement, the key thing has to be always keeping the doors of communication open.

Unless you're going to go into a meeting and be accusatory or say something discriminatory in a meeting, you shouldn't really ever be afraid to have a conversation with your staff. Forward planning and business planning are key to the business. If the business isn't there, there's going to be no employment there, so you have to look at it from a priority point of view.

Rolanda: I was looking up guidance online in relation to this, and the guidance says that a new employee must provide proof of a pregnancy. This is usually a doctor's letter or a MAT B1, so it doesn't have to be a MAT B1.

Seamus: No, it doesn't have to be the form. Yeah.

Rolanda: It just requires some sort of proof.

Seamus: Absolutely, whether that's from the doctor, or from the hospital, or the midwife, or whatever it is. If the employee is coming forward to make that disclosure to you, then I think it needs to be accepted. Let's put it that way.