If you wish to rent a private residential property to a tenant, you are now legally obliged to check whether or not your prospective tenant has the Right to Rent.

You must check anyone aged 18 or over who pays to use your property as their main home, eg. tenants, sub-tenants and paying house guests.

If you’ve bought a property that already has tenants, you need proof that their last landlord did the check. You’ll still be responsible for carrying out further checks on your tenants in future.

There are certain exemptions, which you can find in the Home Office’s Code of practice on illegal immigrants and private rented accommodation.

You can find more information on being a landlord and renting out a room on the Gov.uk website.

If you are advertising on w4mpjobs then you should be aware that from April 2016, most UK workers aged 25 and over are legally entitled to at least £7.20 per hour

Take these four steps to be ready for the change:

1. Check you know who is eligible in your organisation. Find out on GOV. UK’s employment status page.
2. Take the appropriate payroll action. Find useful guidance in HMRC’s tutorials.
3. Let your staff know about their new pay rate.
4. Check your staff under 25 are earning at least the right rate of National Minimum Wage.

You can find out everything you need to know about the new National Living Wage, including the new rates of pay, on the employers’ National Minimum Wage page.

More details 

For any CSI fans out there, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has recently published the following POSTnote:

Digital Forensics and Crime

This briefing looks at the use of digital forensics by UK law enforcement agencies. It covers how evidence is obtained, the legislation and regulation in this area, and the efforts being made to address the challenges faced by practitioners.

Parliament is holding a Recruitment Open Day on Thursday 31 March 2016, focusing on customer-facing jobs.

At the Houses of Parliament there are jobs to suit everyone. If you love working with people and providing excellent customer service then we would like to meet you. There is no need to bring your CV to the Recruitment Open Day.

Members of staff will be available to talk to you about current and future job opportunities and careers in their areas. You can also meet representatives from Parliament’s award winning Workplace Equality Networks and the Recruitment and Diversity and Inclusion teams.

Places are limited so you will need to book a free ticket in advance by calling 020 7219 4114.

For more information, please see the Recruitment Open Day page.

We’ve published the updated list of training courses for staff offered by Learning & Development – see the Training Page for details.

The House of Commons Learning and Development team has announced new dates for training courses in Glasgow Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield.

To see the details, please look at our Training Courses page.

If you would like any of the training courses to take place in a location nearer to your constituency office, please let the Learning and Development team know and, if there’s enough interest from other MPs’ offices to make it viable, they will do their best to accommodate your request.

The EU Referendum will take place on Thursday 23 June 2016, but do you feel that you know enough about the issues in order to make a properly informed choice?

The House of Commons Library has produced a very useful set of papers which will, hopefully, give you the information you need, including:

• Timetable
• Who can vote
• Impact of staying
• The UK ‘deal’
• Impact of leaving
• Alternatives to membership
• Further reading

So, why not go and have a look?

http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/eu-referendum/

A press release from  the Equality and Human Rights Commission warns that thousands of people could be at risk of being denied jobs and services each year due to unlawful, discriminatory adverts, the Equality and Human Rights Commission warns today.

A post on the EHRC website says: “Complaints about adverts which discriminate against older workers or on the basis of sex appear the most common but people are also being prevented from having a fair shot at work opportunities because of their disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other characteristics, according to evidence gathered by the Commission.

The Commission has a series of short guides and checklists for those who place and publish adverts to help them advertise in line with equality legislation.

The advertising guidance is

• Advertising: A good practice checklist for advertisers and publishers
• Frequently asked questions about what is lawful advertising for: jobs; goods, facilities and services; and accommodation
• What equality law means for advertisers and publishers
• Making an enquiry about a discriminatory advert

This week openDemocracy has introduced a new  series ‘How do parliaments shape democracy?’ in collaboration with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), a group offering British expertise in both parliamentary- and political party-strengthening.

WFD aims to use the openDemocracy platform over 2016 to explore some of the most pressing issues facing the sector: such as, what are the obstacles to parliamentary strengthening? How to identify democratic trends and combat democratic backsliding? What’s happening in Russia’s near neighbourhood, in response to the rise of Turkey’s HDP, and what can we learn from poldering in The Netherlands?