Deposit return scheme: impact on small grocers

Section 4: Staff Cost per hour

4.1 Staff costs per hour

An excel model has been produced by the Edinburgh Numberworks which calculates a fully loaded employee cost per hour based on the User inputting a number of criteria:

• Hourly wage rate
  Which can be selected from a grid of National Minimum or Real Living wages currently in place, or any other value determined by the User.
• Employer NIC
  Which picks up the current HMRC contribution rate.
• Pension cost
  Which picks up the current legal minimum percentage.

The Multiple Store estimated that 1 staff hour would be required each day to cover the cleaning and administration of the machine (or process), moving returned containers to and from a store area, and arranging and supervising collections.

On top of this (and especially in the early days after installation) it is expected that additional staff time would be required to 'help' the public use the machine (or process), answering questions and generally helping.

The cost per hour included in Section 2 Table of Values has been calculated this way:

4.2 Extract of the staff cost model:

Based on an employee, at least 25 years old, earning the expected National Living Wage for 2019 of £8.21 ph.

It also assumes that the employee has opted into a pension scheme under Automatic Enrolment, with the Employer contributing the minimum percentage:

It also assumes that the Employer is required to pay the full HMRC NIC amount (in that the employee earns above the NIC threshold and that the Employer has no Employment Allowance available to offset this cost.)

All criteria can easily be changed in the model.