Expert's Comments

In almost all areas of discrimination law, someone who claims that they have been unlawfully discriminated against will have to demonstrate ‘less favourable treatment’ by identifying a comparator...

Some of the Most Significant Employment Law Advances of 2010 have been...

Even though an employer may have good intentions this is not a defence...

In this update, we comment on a number of changes that impacted businesses in 2009...

As regular readers of our updates will be aware, there has recently been a tide of court judgments upholding the rights of long-term absentees to receive holiday pay under the Working Time Regulations, whether during or on termination of employment. Employers will therefore welcome a new decision of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) which provides that such employees may only be entitled to receive paid annual leave if they actually apply for holidays whilst they remain off sick. 

Employment law reform has recently become a hot topic for the mainstream political media in a way that perhaps we have not seen since the 1970s. The reforms to unfair dismissal law and tribunal procedure proposed by the coalition last week are set to have a significant impact on employment rights for employers and employees alike.

It is a well known principle of law that discrimination cannot be justified on the basis of cost alone. Intuitively, this makes sense, as otherwise it would be open to employers to simply decide to discriminate against certain groups within their workforce on the basis that doing so was cheaper than providing their workforce with equal opportunities...

In Update 78 we informed you of the Government’s decision to increase the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from one to two years.

On 1 September 2011 ACAS launched guidance on its website to help UK employers and employees get to grips with cyber issues which are estimated to cost businesses millions of pounds every year.

Update 93 - Expert Comments on ‘new’ TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment)). A relevant transfer takes place either if the old test is met or if the new ‘service provision change’ test is met. Under the ‘service provision change’ test, there is no explicit requirement for anything to retain its identity post-transfer. All that is required is a change of provider of a service and an organised grouping of workers whose principal purpose pre-transfer was carrying out the service now being transferred.