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Charles Pigott
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Supreme Court steers back towards orthodoxy in Methodist minister case
Not many of us have the opportunity to offer advice to ministers of religion. However, the latest case about their employment status to reach the UK’s highest court can perhaps give an indication of the general direction of travel on this important topic. In President of the Methodist Conference v... Continue reading
Posted 2 days ago at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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EAT restores protection against post-employment victimisation
It was perhaps a coincidence that the EAT President chose international labour day to announce a decision that restores protection for workers victimised after their employment has ended. In doing so he disagrees with an earlier judgment from another division of the EAT released two months ago, which reached the... Continue reading
Posted May 9, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Balancing the individual and the collective in ACAS’ new code
ACAS’ new guidance on how to manage collective redundancies is all of a week old. But it has been an interesting week. The news coverage surrounding Baroness Thatcher’s death has made it easier to place this topic in its historical context. The authors of the guidance can not have known... Continue reading
Posted Apr 15, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Government announces revised timetable for employment law changes
A new timeline for the Government’s employment law programme is tucked away on page 18 of Employment law 2013: progress on reform, published last week. This reveals some slippage from the previously published plans, though many appear to be still on target. Precise comparisons with previous announcements can be difficult,... Continue reading
Posted Mar 19, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Secret recordings may still be admissible if shown to be relevant
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled on an employment judge’s decision to exclude evidence in the shape of 39 hours’ worth of unauthorised recordings. The claimant had secretly recorded “dozens” of conversations with work colleagues using a dictaphone, and wanted to use them to support her discrimination claim. The employment... Continue reading
Posted Mar 13, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Blind faith in redundancy selection process led to employer dismissing unfairly
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has upheld a tribunal’s decision strongly criticising a redundancy selection process that relied heavily on a series of exercises designed for use in recruitment and which took no account of past performance. The employment tribunal had been entitled to conclude that the two claimants had been... Continue reading
Posted Mar 7, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Clearer picture of new family-friendly policies begins to emerge
Over the past few weeks more detail has been added to the Government’s plans to increase flexibility in the workplace: Earlier this month, the Children and Families Bill was published, setting out the legal framework for the revamping of shared parental leave which is due to take effect in 2015.... Continue reading
Posted Feb 28, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Final written warning normally really means final
Two recent appeal cases have explored the limited circumstances in which an employment tribunal is entitled to look behind a final written warning when assessing the fairness of a subsequent dismissal. The rule to emerge from previous cases is that a tribunal should only re-open a previous warning where it... Continue reading
Posted Feb 28, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Ministry of Justice can make judicial pensions cake smaller, but must divide it fairly
Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision has confirmed that a fee-paid (ie part-time) recorder who retired back in 2005 was wrongly excluded from a judicial pension. This ruling has broader implications, not only for the wider part-time judiciary, but for our understanding of discrimination law. The Supreme Court had already announced that... Continue reading
Posted Feb 7, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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BIS papers on TUPE, early conciliation and ending employment all published today
The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Jo Swinson has been busy today, signing off on a major TUPE consultation and her department’s proposals for implementing early conciliation via ACAS. She has also published a response to an earlier consultation about settlement agreements and the unfair dismissal compensation cap. Taking the... Continue reading
Posted Jan 17, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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European Court of Human Rights navigates cautiously through religious minefield
The headline news from today's decision is that Ms Eweida has emerged victorious, while the three other applicants (Ms Chaplin, Ms Ladele and Mr McFarlane) have lost their claims. Although the judgment makes some adjustments to human rights case law on Article 9, it seems unlikely that it will make... Continue reading
Posted Jan 15, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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A good old-fashioned sacking can be best
Few managers would take Sir Alan Sugar’s direct approach to dismissal on The Apprentice as their model, but the latest employment case to emerge from the Supreme Court illustrates that an old-fashioned approach can still sometimes work best. The case involved a highly-paid banker employed by Société Générale. One key... Continue reading
Posted Jan 8, 2013 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Court of Appeal denies employment status to lap-dancer
In a decision released just before Christmas, the Court of Appeal has ruled that a dancer working at Stringfellows was not engaged under a contract of employment. This reverses the EAT’s judgment earlier this year, which had overturned the employment tribunal’s decision that she was not an employee. The Court... Continue reading
Posted Dec 27, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Government releases timetable for new employment regulation
The fifth statement of new regulation, published earlier this week, includes some new information about the Government’s timetable for employment law reforms. So here is a quick summary of what we now know about its main plans for the first half of 2013. February: Annual uprating of limits: the upper... Continue reading
Posted Dec 20, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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90 day consultation period for collective redundancies to be halved
In today’s response to consultation the Government has announced that the minimum consultation period for the largest scale collective redundancies will be reduced from 90 to 45 days. The consultation period for smaller redundancy exercises (ie between 20 and 100 redundancies over a 90 day period at a single establishment)... Continue reading
Posted Dec 18, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Supreme Court rules out discrimination law protection for volunteers
This morning’s judgment from the Supreme Court has established that volunteers without a legally binding contract are not protected by either domestic or EU anti-discrimination law. This case involves a HIV positive volunteer who alleged she had been prevented from continuing to volunteer at a CAB because of her disability.... Continue reading
Posted Dec 12, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Langstaff lays down law on written warnings
In an appeal involving two lorry drivers from North-West England, the EAT President Mr Justice Langstaff has issued new guidance for employment tribunals about the status of written warnings. The message is that tribunals should not go behind earlier warnings, unless issued in bad faith. He also explained how to... Continue reading
Posted Dec 3, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Redundancy dismissals without warning or consultation can be fair
The EAT has confirmed that the dismissal of an associate director at JJB Sports was fair despite the absence of any consultation or warning over the appointment of his replacement. Given that that overall standard is that of a reasonable employer, it has always been clear that such a decision... Continue reading
Posted Nov 27, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Gay marriage comments on Facebook not breach of contract
The High Court has decided that a housing association was in breach of contract when it demoted Adrian Smith for saying on his personal Facebook page that gay marriage was an “equality too far”. Beyond the controversial topic of gay marriage, this case is of wider interest because it illustrates... Continue reading
Posted Nov 27, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Clegg points way to fully flexible workplaces
Nick Clegg has shared his vision for the future of workplaces in yesterday’s speech, which launched part of the Government’s response to last year’s modern workplaces consultation. That consultation had four strands, and we now have responses on two of them - flexible working and flexible parental leave. The extension... Continue reading
Posted Nov 14, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Supreme Court endorses six year time limit for equal pay claims
The Supreme Court has confirmed that women can have up to six years to challenge breaches of equal pay legislation if they bring a claim in the high court rather than the employment tribunal. That gives women much longer to enforce their rights to equal pay against their former employers.... Continue reading
Posted Oct 31, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Details of new employee owner contracts start to emerge
Following on from George Osbourne’s announcement of employee owner contracts at the Conservative Party Conference last month, we now have a consultation paper and some draft legislation. The first instalment of the enabling legislation takes the form of a clause in the Growth and Infrastructure Bill which received its first... Continue reading
Posted Oct 24, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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ECJ passes the buck on collective redundancies
In today's decision the European Court of Justice has declined to answer an important question on collective redundancies posed by the Court of Appeal nearly two years ago. The ECJ has said that it has no jurisdiction to deal with the reference, mainly because the United States Government could have... Continue reading
Posted Oct 18, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Redundancy and selection for alternative employment
Last month’s Employment Appeal Tribunal decision addresses what should happen if an employee selected for alternative employment resigns before the redundancy notices take effect. Is the employer obliged to re-offer the vacancy to an employee who has previously been selected for redundancy? The answer is no, if there is good... Continue reading
Posted Oct 8, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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Court of Appeal clarifies territorial scope of Equality Act
Last week’s Court of Appeal decision has confirmed that a sex discrimination claim could be brought by a partner in a legal firm arising out of work she had been doing in Tanzania. However it ruled out a whistleblowing claim on the grounds that she did not satisfy the statutory... Continue reading
Posted Oct 2, 2012 at Mills & Reeve: HR Law Live
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