How the new National Minimum Wage, Payslip and Auto-enrolment laws will impact Productions
There are new changes to the law which will affect all companies employing extras across film and TV.
Below we’ve summarised what changes are in/coming into effect, how these will impact you, your teams and your productions and how we’ve got you covered.
POP has invested significantly from a technical and legal perspective to support these requirements, and have built out our technology to be ready for the April 6th deadline. Working with an Agent or Agency powered by POP for your background casting means you and your productions are covered.
What’s changing?
- National Minimum Wage increase as of 6 April 2019
- New Payslip law
- Auto-enrolment pension payment impact of the recent law changes
PLUS, new FAA rates and studio InfoSec approval for the POP Production Platform.
National Minimum Pay Rates Increase
What is changing?
The National Living Wage is increasing to £8.21 per hour on 6 April - see main HMRC page here.
What do I need to do?
Work with your production and crowd budget to ensure Supporting Artists are receiving at least £8.21 per hour for both shoot days and fittings, ideally taking into account any deductions they may incur
New Payslip Law
What is changing?
All hirers (Productions) will be required to provide self employed workers (Supporting Artists) with payslips - see the official amendment to the Employment Rights Act here and the official HMRC guidance here
What do I need to do?
If you have chosen to work with an Agent or Agency Powered by POP… nothing. Our in-house tech team have built payslip functionality into the Casting Portal platform and payslips will be automatically generated and provided, on behalf of the Production, to any SA who is booked through a Agent or Agency Powered by POP.
In practical terms, every time a remittance is generated for an SA it will show them how many hours they’ve been paid for, and how much pay they have received. Let the platform do the hard work so you don’t have to.
Introduction of Auto enrolment
What’s changed?
The government mandated that everyone has a pension, whether they want it or not.
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A worker/employee can opt-out within the first 30 days of being auto-enrolled but will be re-enrolled every 3 years.
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An employer can’t legally ask or suggest a worker/employee to opt-out.
What do I need to do?
As Supporting Artists are temporary workers, to qualify they will need to work for 3 months+ and reach a qualifying level of pay - so your project may not be affected by auto-enrolment - here’s a useful link with further info.
If you are working on a project with a recurring group of Supporting Artists that film for the course of 3 months or over and you are using an Agent or Agency Powered by POP:
We will:
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Work with you to identify where Artists may be impacted and how we can support
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Work with the Agents and Agencies Powered by POP to enable management of when an artist has been enrolled or opted out of a pension scheme, or an artists has ceased membership of a pension or chosen options contributions and percentage the user wants deducted
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Invoice the pension charges to you and apply pension deduction to artist remittance. Transfer deducted amount to pension scheme and collect and display the information on the artist profiles
New FAA Rates
On the 1st March the updated PACT/FAA rates came into force. You can read all about the changes here
Your security is important to us
We’re delighted to announce that the Casting Portal platform is InfoSec approved by FOX, Warner Brothers and other major studios.
This is a high level stamp of approval from the world’s biggest studios for the security around the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data on the Casting Portal platform.
Security and data privacy are embedded at the core of all of our development to ensure our technology is global industry-standard.