That the former owner of BHS gives the £500m he is alleged to have taken out of the company to the about to be made redundant workers, by way of helping them on their way to new careers. My calculator says that this would work out at around £50,000 a head, almost certainly more than a year's pay for most of them.
The personnel people could earn their crust by deciding who exactly was going to be eligible for this windfall and how exactly it was going to be divi'd up. Lots of scope for nasty arguments around the margins when that sort of money is at stake. While HMRC could think about whether income tax was payable.
PS: this morning, the phrase 'the devil is in the detail' came to mind. I don't know whether this is the sort of thing from whence the phrase sprang, but one can certainly see that what, in this case, starts as a work of charity, can soon descend, once one gets down to detail, down to brass tacks, to use another colloquialism, into unseemly squabbling. Whatever rules the personnel people come up with, with this number of people, say 10,000, there are always going to be people at the margins of those rules who feel cheated. What about, for example, the chap on unpaid paternity leave who did not work at all in the reference period? What about the contract cleaners, not on the BHS payroll at all?
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