First time au pair employer - need your experience please

[brushyourhair]

Hello,

I'm just about to employ an au pair for the first time and wondered if I could pick your collective brains.

I am paying £80 a week which I understand is below the threshold for NI &
Tax, is that correct?

Do you all have a contract with your Au Pair?

Do you have to have employer liability insurance? i.e. if they fall down your stairs and break their leg could they sue you! Or am I being a bit paranoid...

Also if they are based abroad are you supposed to pay their airfare over to the UK or do they take care of that themselves?

Thanks so much, sorry for all the questions, just want to avoid headaches later on. Many thanks.

You should have a contract with your au pair and probably a set of 'house rules' or something as well.

You don't need to pay their airfare to get here.

Not sure about the liability insurance. You need to have it for a nanny, so maybe best to have it for an au pair as well? Someone will be along later who knows the answer to this!

Thanks HolyCamera!

Re the contract what sort of things should the contract cover? I'm a complete novice at this so not sure what I need to include.

Have a look at your home contents insurance policy, it may include Employers Liability insurance.

Will do thanks very much

We had au pairs before the employment law changed, but some things will still hold.

We wrote out exactly what we'd like the au pair to do, e.g. hours, taking on outside work, etc.etc. Without exception they all appreciated this as 1) They could read it at their leisure and fully understand what was needed 2) They could see it was not some open-ended contract with all the power on the host's side.

An example would be an expectation of two baby-sits each week, but weekends were their own. Weekend babysits could only be by arrangement and in advance. In the end, we never used the week babysits, and only once at a weekend, at short notice, when I had to visit a friend who was dying.

I can't emphasise enough how au pairs, like everyone else, like to be able to order their lives.

Not sure what change to employment law you are referring to?