Are there any legal 'gotchas' in setting up a company to hire someone as a private live in carer for an elderly relative?

Request

I'm not sure this is the ideal location for this post but it's not /r/personalfinance and it's not quite starting your own business

Am I missing any key legal points?

Overview

My grandfather is in a position where due to his infirmity (mainly physical but a bit demented) his partner who currently looks after him feels she can't cope. He lives in a large detached house with three spare bedrooms and has significant financial assets. This is not a request on how we can avoid paying for nursing home care, but instead on how we can use his finances to pay for an alternative.

Ideally what we would like to do is use two of the spare bedrooms to provide accommodation for two people who would assist my grandfathers partner in looking after him and would receive payment for this.

Duties

Share responsibility for * Cooking

• Cleaning

• Laundry

• Assisting grandfather with getting dressed, making sure he doesn't fall over, general elder care

Benefits

• Accomodation in a well appointed house (we'd make sure decent internet & wireless was fitted)

• Food included

• Utilities included

• Salary

Details

My initial idea was that we would form a company to employee these people making it easy to

• Take out employee liability insurance

• Outsource pay & taxes to a payroll company

Questions

As accomodation is free this means it can be offset against the weekly pay at a rate of £42/week for when calculating national minimum wage.

We're picturing the people looking after my grandfather as probably being in education student nurses/teachers or part time shift workers as we would need some cover.

This means at the moment we're thinking that over a 7 day period they'd probably be working for 15 hours and to be fair we'd pay the over 25 rate of £7.50 hour

So the weekly rate would be 15 * 7.50 = 112.50 - 42 = £70

As a room in a shared house in this area would be at least £100/week + £25/week food this nets out at around £200/week total package

This seems low to me as the total cost to us would be £70 * 52 * 2 = 7,336/year when care homes are in the order of £50K/year

Am I missing something here? (More of an ethical than legal question)

I think these are the key things we need to cover

• Ensuring we pay national minimum wage

• Employer liability insurance

• Holiday pay

• National Insurance Contributions, income tax

• Pensions

Our plan is to use a payroll firm and hire an accountant to manage this, but am I missing anything key?

Overall are there any key legal points we're missing in our idea to set up a company to hire two people to provide live in care assistance?

Submitted March 01, 2017 at 05:32AM by BeardedBaldMan http://ift.tt/2lbCRy3