During the last few weeks people have been coming together in our communities to tackle the Covid-19 crisis, helping others in need in their neighbourhoods. Over 200 local groups and charities have received essential funding to do incredible things – helping local people get food and medicine, supporting those who are lonely and anxious, and much more: https://www.norfolkfoundation.com/news-events Getting a supply of regular food and essentials to many vulnerable people is a critical part of our funding support, however we are also now seeing the wider impact of Covid-19 on issues such as homelessness, domestic abuse and bereavement, and are focusing on supporting established charities that are making a strategic difference in working to tackle these issues. Could your business help this vital work go a little further? The substantial community effort so far has been made possible with the support of over 1,000 donors, helping to raise over £800,000, and is only the beginning of a long journey towards tackling the fallout from Covid-19 and the issues facing our communities for the foreseeable future. To find out more and donate visit Norfolk Community Foundation’s website: https://www.norfolkfoundation.com/giving-philanthropy/covid19communityresponsefund
Great Yarmouth Borough Council is urging residents to continue supporting local businesses which are continuing to deliver essential services to their communities during the coronavirus pandemic.
While many business premises have had to close to support national social distancing measures, food delivery and takeaway services remain operational, as well as grocery shops, hardware shops, car garages, and post offices. In addition, there are varied businesses and self-employed people continuing to operate from home.
A number of locally-based businesses have gone the extra mile to support their communities during these challenging times, including:
Vehicle dealership Pertwee and Back has loaned vans to the council to enable council staff to deliver food to “sheltered” residents and keep local food banks stocked up, as well as to undertake medical deliveries.
Thompsons Food Service has donated supplies to the food distribution hub at the Town Hall and has also put together food parcels designed for those who are unable to leave the house, including the vulnerable and elderly.
Filby Post Office has sourced supplies for the food distribution hub at the Town Hall and is working with volunteers to offer food deliveries for residents who cannot leave the house, as well as top ups for electric, gas and phones.
A number of other organisations have supported the food distribution hub at the Town Hall, including the Lidl stores at Great Yarmouth and Caister, and Norwich City FC Community Sports Foundation.
The council is updating an online list of grocery shops, food delivery and takeaway services operating within the borough. Visit www.great-yarmouth.gov.uk/coronavirus
While hotels and guest houses are currently closed to visitors, they are allowed to provide temporary accommodation for key workers. To support local businesses and key workers, the council is maintaining a list of those hoteliers making rooms available for key workers during the pandemic. Visit www.great-yarmouth.gov.uk/key-worker-accommodation
Cllr Carl Smith, the council leader, said: “I’m so proud of the way our whole community has pulled together to support the response. We are doing all we can to ensure our local businesses get the support they are entitled to. Equally, many local businesses which are able to continue trading are doing a fantastic job in tough times.
“A huge thank you to the businesses which have made generous bulk donations to the food distribution hub at the Town Hall. This is helping the council to supply our community-run food banks so they can continue supporting those in need.
“Some businesses have changed their operating models in order to assist their communities, whether working from home or shifting from wholesalers to supplying the public directly. During these challenging times for tourism, it’s great to see hoteliers playing their part in the response by providing accommodation for key workers.
“By everyone supporting the local businesses, this helps to support our local economy and also reduces unnecessary travel from outside the borough. Please do consider using local food suppliers and delivery services, especially if you are struggling to place orders with the national supermarkets.”
If you are a business and are able to donate in bulk non-perishable food or other essential items to include in food parcels, please contact [email protected] (telephone 01493 846343) or [email protected] (telephone 01493 846125) to arrange either a collection from your business premises or a drop-off at the Town Hall. If you are a member of the public and wish to donate food items, please donate these directly to the food banks.
Relief grants for businesses
Great Yarmouth Borough Council has so far handed out £22m in Government relief grants to eligible local businesses – and is reminding those eligible businesses which have not yet claimed their money to complete the online form.
Visit www.great-yarmouth.gov.uk/coronavirus-business-support for the link to the online form, information and support about the grants, eligibility criteria and further business advice. For advice relating to the grants, call our Business Helpline on 0808 196 2240. For other business advice, contact the Growth Hub via 0300 333 6536 or www.newangliagrowthhub.co.uk
TaxAssist Accountants may be in lockdown like most of the nation, but they are still very much open for business.
TaxAssist Accountants are working hard to keep in contact with their clients to provide help and guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic. All franchisees are still open for business by following Government guidelines about working remotely, so are still able to communicate, sign up new clients and carry out work.
The Support Centre staff are working hard too and have received very positive feedback from franchisees on the measures that have been put in place to support the network.
Nick Sims, who operates from TaxAssist Devizes and Chippenham, says: “I have never regretted the decision to set-up in practice as a franchisee, I always believed that the back-up of the Support Centre would be both reassuring and an invaluable asset that most sole practitioners can never experience.
“Indeed, this has always been the case but never more so than now. Although Daren Moore (Group Commercial Director) and James Mattam (Group Business Development Director) have led/fronted the effort magnificently, it is very clear indeed that the immense amount of work and tangible output is very much a wider team effort.
“They have been absolutely brilliant and I would be amazed if any other accountancy organisation has got anywhere close to delivering what they have in the past few weeks.”
Terry Peachman from TaxAssist Lincoln concurs: “The information you guys have pushed out has helped enormously as it has informed and educated clients (and ourselves) and helped them (and us) understand and make some sense of what was evolving in front of their eyes.
“In our conversations and by email we have frequently had appreciation expressed for the information sent out through the centralised emails. Thank you for all that you have done to assist us. “My philosophy this week has been ‘what we do for them today our clients will remember us for in the future'”.
Hannah Campbell, at TaxAssist Dalkeith, Leith, Fairmilehead and Musselburgh says: “As a large franchise we are still working our way through phone calls to each client, however the fact that we have been able to keep all clients updated regularly and over the evenings and weekends helps us show clients that we are doing our very best to get this information out to them. I am confident that the loyalty we will get from clients will pay off in the years to come.”
The speed of response to the latest announcements by the Support Centre was praised by Horsforth-based Will Swift: “Massive thank you from me, the team and all our clients to each and every one of you at Support Centre for the monumental efforts you are making during the current situation.
“On top of everything else, a release to all clients within an hour of the chancellor finishing his address last night, very, very powerful for us when taking to clients at a local level.”
TaxAssist prides itself on the friendly, family feel it cultivates both for staff and its nationwide network of accountants. Kingswinford and Wolverhampton based Lloyd Evans comments: “Thank you Karl and the whole team for your FANTASTIC help during very testing times. It is during times like these that you truly realise and appreciate the strength of the bond within the TaxAssist family.”
Karl Sandall, Group Chief Executive, says: “I am always proud of the level of support we provide to our network of accountants, but in these unprecedented times, I have really seen everyone pull together to provide quite exceptional levels of help and guidance. We always value feedback from franchisees and it is fantastic to hear how well our efforts have been received.”
If you would like to find out more about joining the network of TaxAssist Accountants, we are holding Virtual Discovery Days for the next few months, with the next running on Saturday 16th May. For more information click here.
Liftshare scooped two awards at the 2017/18 Norfolk & Norwich Eco Awards, taking home both Small/Medium Business of the Year and the Eco Hero titles!
The Awards aim to celebrate projects and schemes with a strong ecological or environmentally-friendly ethos or groups and organisations which can show they adopt a sound eco approach to all their business. A great mix of businesses, community groups and individuals were present, spanning a huge range of disciplines, interests, and approaches.
Now the biggest car sharing community in the UK, the profits from clients enable Liftshare to provide a free, public service that’s open to all, in Liftshare.com. The network continues to save carbon, cut costs, and deliver a social experience for sharers.
Liftshare has over 500,000 active members (that is, those offering or looking for a lift) at present, and a recent member survey showed that 77% of members were interested in joining to help ‘do their bit’ for the environment.
Recognising the continued opportunity to follow their mission and ensure that everyone has someone to share with, Liftshare also offers a personalised travel planning tool which includes sustainable travel options, and from 2017 will include community transport options – a first for travel planning, and a completely unique product! The team also offer their expertise out to others wanting to encourage sustainable travel – running behaviour change workshops and undertaking data scoping to gain workable intelligence on existing transport data.
Members of the Liftshare Team will return to the Norfolk and Norwich Eco Awards next year to pass the baton on to the 2018/19 Eco Hero.
If you’d like more information on introducing a Liftshare scheme for your business, or think personalised travel planning or car sharing could work for your organisation, get in touch with the Liftshare Business Team.
Flagship Group and Victory Housing Trust have today (Wednesday 2 January) agreed to work in partnership creating the largest housing association in the East of England owning and managing 28,000 homes.
Over the next 10 years, the new partnership has set an ambitious target to invest £534m in maintaining and improving existing homes and to build more than 10,000 new homes. An important part of this is to develop as many new social rented homes as possible. The partnership will save over £38m in its first ten years and its development investment is expected to support 400 new jobs.
Victory has joined Flagship as a subsidiary retaining its identity and ensuring continuity of tenancy for its Norfolk residents as well as stability for its staff.
Peter Hawes, Chair of Flagship Group, said: “We are both strong and successful housing associations, but together we can be even stronger and more successful. Collectively, we have enhanced financial strength, greater effectiveness and efficiency, the ability to invest more in our existing homes, and support our customers.”
Philip Burton, Vice Chair of Flagship Group (former Chair of Victory Housing Trust), added:
“This is an exciting time for Victory as together we can deliver more affordable homes and better-quality services to our residents and our communities. The partnership will create organisational growth and also greater opportunities for individual growth and progression for our staff.”
About Victory Housing Trust
Victory Housing Trust is a charitable registered social landlord which owns and manages over 5,000 properties in Norfolk, serving over 10,000 residents.
The majority of its properties are located in North Norfolk, but it also has homes in Broadland, Great Yarmouth, Breckland, South Norfolk and King’s Lynn and West Norfolk.
Based in North Walsham, Victory employs 90 staff and has an annual turnover of £26 million.
It has been a proactive developer of new affordable homes, and has completed 1053 since its inception in 2006, and is currently delivering new homes at the rate of around 200 per year.
About Flagship Group
Flagship Group owns and manages over 22,700 homes for people in housing need across the East of England.
The on-going maintenance and repair of our homes is undertaken by the Group’s other core service, RFT Services, and it owns heating company Gasway which it purchased in 2016.
Based in Norfolk and Suffolk, Flagship Group employs a total of 866 staff. In 2017/18 Flagship had an annual turnover of £133.7m.
Charlie Walker of TaxAssist Bedford, St Neots and Huntingdon shares his thoughts on life as a TaxAssist Accountants franchisee during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Charlie Walker has been a TaxAssist Accountants franchisee for two years and in that time has grown his practice to look after in excess of 200 clients. Here, he shares how he now spends his days, his feedback about the support provided by TaxAssist Accountants and his plans for the future.
“At the moment, my days aren’t too different to those before the crisis began,” explains Charlie. “The key change has been that my commute is only to another room in my house most days, though I am calling into both shops from time to time to collect non digitised client records and post.”
“We start each day with a team catch up using Zoom, which is as much a social chat as it is a work one. Once the Zoom chat is over and we all know what we are going to be doing for the day, I start my work. This can involve traditional tax returns or, as is often the case now, working with clients to help them to protect their businesses, be that by applying for grants or loans or outlining the impact of the government schemes on them as individuals.”
Charlie operates his practice from shops in Bedford and Huntingdon and an office in St Neots. He himself has benefitted from one of the measures introduced by the Government to support small businesses.
“Having a shop with a rateable value of less than £15,000 means we have been in receipt of a grant of £10,000 from the local authority which is a great help in uncertain times. If anyone would like to know more about the Government’s support measures, I am very much open for business and can either speak over the phone, email or offer a face-to-face meeting over the internet.”
Charlie has maintained regular contact with his clients where he can, during these difficult times and has been praised for doing so. “Feedback from clients ranges from simple emails saying things like ‘that’s great, thanks for the update’ to online reviews from businesses we [don’t yet] act for but who were pleased to be able to get some advice. I have also been asked to take a non-executive director role on the board of a key service provider we act for based on work we have done with them over the last year, and on that I was able negotiate a revised fee structure and interim grant for them. The same client has also agreed to hand over almost their entire financial support and bookkeeping to TaxAssist, so the owners and directors can focus on building their unique business.”
The TaxAssist Accountants Support Centre has rolled out several measures to support its franchisees, which Charlie is quick to praise alongside the staff members themselves. “The daily updates and regular webinars organised by The Support Centre have been useful but the key thing I have had from TaxAssist in Norwich is continuity. The team has remained the same friendly, helpful and knowledgeable group that they have been since I joined the network in 2018 which has been great.”
Charlie is looking positively on the future and has plans in place to grow his practice. “Clearly the pandemic has caused a huge global shock, but with my services very much in demand, I believe now is a great opportunity to think about expanding my practice and I’ve entered into a discussion about a new premises in a prime location. I know that the economy will contract for a while, but a recent OBR forecast indicates that by early next year there should be a period of rapid growth once again.
“In the meantime, I just want to wish all my clients and colleagues well and urge them to please stay home and stay safe whenever they can.”
The ABI has developed the protocol in response to the unprecedented challenge which firms across the personal injury sector are facing as a result of the spread of COVID-19. The protocol recognises that the pandemic provides opportunities for both claimants and defendants in personal injury cases to opportunistically gain an unfair advantage by, for example, taking advantage of missed deadlines.
The protocol includes:
An agreement that all limitation dates in all personal injury cases are frozen and claimants undertake to respond constructively to defendant requests for extension of time to serve a Defence;
An escalation process whereby any issue arising by a party’s failure to act in accordance with the agreement in 1. above and which cannot immediately be resolved between the parties is referred to an email and/or telephone ‘hotline’ specifically established for this situation; and
A commitment that the email and telephone hotline will be monitored regularly and referred to senior people within the respective organisations who will be able to make a swift decision as to whether the stance being taken should be adjusted in light of prevailing circumstances.
The immediate extension to the personal injury protocol took effect from 24 March 2020, for a minimum of four weeks, with a review to take place the week commencing 13 April 2020.
Colin Cook, Hatch Brenner Head of Dispute Resolution and Norwich Personal Injury Solicitor commented: “We fully pledge our support the ABI in their swift development of this protocol, providing a practical framework aimed at mitigating the impact of disruption to ongoing cases, and preventing opportunistic tactics by either claimants or defendants in personal injury cases during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Innovation and collaboration are key, and it is very encouraging to see so many insurers and law firms sign up so far. We must work together to continue to give our clients the help and support they need during these challenging and uncertain times.
“We expect to see continued temporary amendments to the overall litigation process to adapt to this unprecedented global challenge; particularly more general extensions to time periods, and other process suspensions to ensure ongoing access to justice for all.”
Colin Cook, Personal Injury specialist, is fully accessible during this time via phone and email via 01603 660 811 or [email protected]. View his profile on our website here.
The Ministry of Justice has announced a further delay to the implementation of the whiplash claims process reforms; until April 2021. This is the second postponement of the planned reforms within the last two months, with the delay attributed to the unprecedented impact of the disruption and pressures caused by the global coronavirus pandemic.
The intended reforms include increasing the small claims limit for road traffic accident personal injury claims to £5,000, meaning costs will no longer be able to be recovered for cases worth less than that amount. There will also be a fixed damages tariff for whiplash injuries that last up to two years, and a ban on making or accepting offers to settle a whiplash claim without a medical report.
Colin Cook, Hatch Brenner Norwich Personal Injury Solicitor commented: “This is good news for claimants as the reforms largely favour insurers. The delay will afford claimants with low value claims a further period of respite and access to justice until the planned reforms are implemented. I would recommend anyone contemplating making such a claim to do so without delay. We have the systems, technology and processes in place at Hatch Brenner to handle these types of legal claims remotely whilst remaining approachable, sympathetic and offering clear and straightforward legal advice.”
Contact our Personal Injury Solicitors to discuss your whiplash legal claim via 01603 660 811 or email [email protected]
Sick couriers can be charged £250 if they can’t find cover brings employment status back into the news again with more questions about the employment rights of self-employed couriers.
As part of their 2017 charity initiative supporting Break, a team of staff members from East Anglian recruitment company Cooper Lomaz will be participating in the National Three Peaks Challenge. The incredibly tough challenge, which is popular amongst charity fundraisers, will see the team attempting to climb the three highest mountains – Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike & Snowden – in the British Isles within 24 hours.
The team of 9, which is made up from a mixture of Directors, Recruitment Consultants and Support Staff, will commence the challenge on 30th June 2017 and complete it on the 2nd of July.
Cooper Lomaz is doing the National Three Peaks Challenge in order to raise money for Break, their chosen corporate charity of 2017. Cooper Lomaz chose Break as its charity because of their strong family values which are in line with the great work that Break does, supporting children and families within Norfolk.
Operations Director, Mark Fletcher says “We are excited to be putting ourselves through the paces, doing this incredibly tough challenge in order to raise money for those who need it most. As a father of four young children, I can really empathise with the work that Break is doing for families”
The National Three Peaks Challenge will see the team – Emma O’Brien, Matt Barber, Richard Beastall, Stuart Wilson, Alex Hall, Mark Fletcher, Phillip Watson, Simon Brown & Liam Flegg – walk a total of 27 miles and ascending a whopping 9,800ft.
Commercial Director, Simon Brown says “Teamwork is not just about what happens in the office, but also outside whether it’s social events or work within the community. As tough as it will be, it will also be a fun challenge and we’re incredibly excited to train and achieve this as a team”
This year Cooper Lomaz has set a target of raising £10,000 for Break through their many charity events such as a Firewalk, Dress Down Days and a Bake Sale amongst other events that are to be confirmed.
Shield Health and Safety are pleased to welcome two new instructors to the team, Jack & Jordan who both bring a wealth of experience. You can read more about Jack & Jordan on our July newsletter via the link below.