Hand car wash must improve its operations

A CAR wash in Rhondda Cynon Taf has been given an improvement notice by the council for breaching coronavirus rules.

Llanharan Hand Car Wash, in Bridgend Road, Llanharan, has been given the notice because employees were cleaning the inside of a customer’s car within two metres of each other and were not wearing face coverings.

On Sunday, February 28, the enforcement officer also reported that there was no hand sanitiser available on the premises.

The officer also said items were exchanged between customers and the employee while the employee was not wearing a face covering and that staff said they were not trained on how to provide a Covid-19 safe service.

The notice said the car wash had failed to comply with the obligations of coronavirus regulations which mean they need to take reasonable measures to minimise risk of exposure to coronavirus.

The notice said that to comply, the car wash would need to train all staff to adhere to social distancing measures and wear a face covering when dealing face to face and in close proximity to one another.

It said they need to provide hand sanitiser for staff and customer use and ensure staff have access to hand-washing facilities at all times.

UNION leaders said the Chancellor’s silence on pay for public sector workers was “deafening”.

Officials of unions representing hundreds of thousands of public sector workers and civil servants described Rishi Sunak’s Budget as an “insult”.

Many public sector workers face a pay freeze this year despite calls for an increase because of their efforts during the coronavirus crisis.

Rehana Azam, national officer of the GMB, said: “The Chancellor can dance around his living room with the ministerial red box all he wants, but all this Budget shows to public sector workers is that his clapping is a worthless gesture.

“When it comes down to it, the big ‘love-in’ and ‘immense praise’ has amounted to nothing for the workers that carried us through the pandemic. Nor has he changed the superspreader policy of poverty sick pay that prevents people from self-isolating.

“This Budget is an insult to the millions of NHS, schools, care, local government workers who have seen us through this crisis.”

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), said: “Rishi Sunak has failed to vaccinate the economy from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“His refusal to lift the pay cap on civil servants and other public sector workers, who have kept the country going during the pandemic, is a disgrace and economically illiterate.”

TAXES are likely to reach their “highest sustained level in history” as the Government seeks to repair the damage to the public finances caused by the coronavirus crisis, a leading economist warned.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, said “we are in a new phase of UK economic history”, after Chancellor Rishi

Sunak set out plans to raise extra funds from business and personal taxes.

The IFS said the Budget’s forecast of raising an extra £29bn by 2025-26 was “big by recent standards”.

Mr Johnson said it was the “biggest tax-raising Budget since Norman Lamont’s final Budget” in 1993 – pointing out “he was sacked a couple of months later”.

In his Budget, Mr Sunak set out plans for corporation tax on business profits to rise from 19% to 25% in 2023, although there will be lower rates for smaller firms.

The tax hike is forecast to raise an extra £17.2bn a year by 2025-26.

Mr Johnson said: “Make no mistake, this proposed increase in the main rate of corporation tax is a big reversal of decades of policy direction and a significant risk.

“For all the rhetoric about it leaving the headline rate here below that in other G7 countries, our effective tax rate will be relatively high.”