Hiring "kids" to do landscaping

Diagro said:
Yo,

What's the legality issues of hiring some teenagers to do some basic landscaping work?

Need it doing, seen some teens offering a cheap daily rate to do it.
(Ofc I'd supervise as I've done these jobs before).

What would you pay them? £9hr? I was thinking a tenner an hour.

I've no interest in getting a landscaping company in to do it. It's VERY basic work which a few have quoted £400 a day for. No chance my brain would allow that.
I however have booked them in for bigger things like fencing and ground level raising.
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Welcome to the forum Mr Rees-Mogg.
 
i would recommend getting the ‘kids’ parents on board ( make sure they are ok with this ) with this otherwise they are going to go home and tell people like their family and friends you were working kids for an exaggerated ‘low pay’ Which will give the impression you were sending them up chimneys or something
 
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I am sure that supervised paid work on a casual basis is entirely proper. They are unlikely to be liable for any NI or tax. I worked on several cash in hand jobs in my teens particularly helping neighbours with footings work. Just make sure they wear decent boots and gloves possibly eye protection as well.
 
Malevolence said:
We used to do this as kids all the time to earn a bit of pocket money, gardening, paving, trimming trees/hedges and the like. Even did a bit of car maintenance too. Shows just how ****** up this country has become if there's all this palaver.
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Same. Washing cars. Trimming hedges. Mowing lawns.
 
If unrelated/not neighbours kids I'd be a bit wary of them at the least.

We have and do pay my nephews at times to help with the garden or other jobs, but we already know them (obviously) and have an idea about how sensible they are.

I probably wouldn't worry too much about paying some neighbourhood kids to say wash the car or cut the lawn if they were old enough to be reasonably sensible, but unsupervised use of other power tools etc I'd be very wary of.

Having said that, my dad was doing gardneing/landscaping work when he was very young, but that didn't involve power tools (even petrol mowers were rare in his area) and it was back in the early 50's.
 
Malevolence said:
We used to do this as kids all the time to earn a bit of pocket money, gardening, paving, trimming trees/hedges and the like. Even did a bit of car maintenance too. Shows just how ****** up this country has become if there's all this palaver.
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It's the where there's blame there's a claim culture I guess, sad to say. If I damaged myself doing something for a neighbour as a kid my old man would just have said more damn fool you and shrugged it off. I never lost a limb or anything though, so not sure just how far his nonchalance would have stretched...
 
The key word here is supervision. If they were to injury themselves you would likely be liable.
 
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Chris Wilson said:
It's the where there's blame there's a claim culture I guess, sad to say. If I damaged myself doing something for a neighbour as a kid my old man would just have said more damn fool you and shrugged it off. I never lost a limb or anything though, so not sure just how far his nonchalance would have stretched...
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There is a good chance as a kid you weren't using the sort of power tools that are really common now:)

When my nephews did the hedges they managed to cut through the power cable of the trimmer about 3 times in 2 years, and broke the teeth on another one (still not sure how).

When I was about 14 I ended up shadowing a couple of groundskeepers for a week, which was fun and gave me the first experience of using a petrol hedge trimmer (big thing), but it was fully supervised at all times.
 
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Health and safety. Pfft. We used to go bailing in the summer. You know, those things that rip farmers arms off. And we used to stack them on to the back of trailers and sit on top while the farmer drove them back to the farm down the roads.
 
I've considered this before as well. As a 15/16 year old I'd love to have had the opportunity to earn a few quid doing what I could do best....he strong and ignorant.

I'd happily pay someone to help me clear the garden/dig holes in turn etc..

I just don't know where to ask for kids.
 
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