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Religious Discrimination: At a legal crossroads

Oliver Spratt and Louise Mason consider the implications of the European Court of Human Rights’ decision in Eweida The tribunal rejected Eweida’s claim because wearing a cross was not a mandatory requirement of the Christian faith, but rather her personal choice. Judgment in Eweida & ors v United Kingdom was handed down on 15 January …
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Health At Work: Strong medicine to combat sickness absence

Employers should welcome the government’s positive response to the review of sickness absence, says Adam Lambert he whole sicknessmanagement process is strongly influenced by the need to make sure the actions of the employer would stand up to scrutiny if the employee is dismissed.The government’s Employer’s Charter is not a very helpful document. Despite the …
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Equal Pay: Mid-life crisis or fresh start?

Recent case law and government proposals could lead to a turning point in equal pay claims, suggests Brona Reeves By their nature, private sector employers tend to have a much narrower set of roles, which do not fall so easily into traditional ‘male’ or ‘female’ jobs. As the evidence sessions of the Women in the …
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TUPE: Back to the future

Richard Kenyon and Lee Harding examine the government’s proposals to scrap the service provision change test and the requirement to provide employee liability information Repealing the employee liability information obligations makes transfers potentially easier for transferors but at the expense of some certainty for transferees. On 17 January 2013 the coalition government issued a consultation …
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Agency Workers: Reform of recruitment sector regulation

Employment businesses and agencies could become effectively unregulated if government inspections are removed, warns Adam Hartley The most striking feature of the consultation paper is that it makes no concrete proposals on how the regulatory framework should be adapted to reflect the changing labour market and business environment within which agencies for temporary work are …
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Employee Shareholders: Risks not rewards

The government has failed to address many of the concerns highlighted during the consultation on shares for rights, finds James Warren The government has also acknowledged the need for further consideration of the tax treatment of the proposals and, in particular, the potential income tax charge related to the initial issue of shares to employees. …
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Collective Redundancy: A missed opportunity

Andrea Finn considers the impact of halving the minimum period for consulting on large-scale redundancies The government has said that it will work with Acas and stakeholders to assess the merits of including the detail suggested by employers and by the TUC. On 18 December 2012, the UK government published its response to its consultation …
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Service Provision Changes: Application of TUPE narrows

Mark Kaye reviews a recent case on when the exemption for a single specific event or task of short-term duration is triggered There is a risk that clients and service providers could circumvent the application of TUPE by deliberately agreeing to enter into contracts that are unusually short term in duration, only to extend the …
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Termination Of Employment: It ain’t over ’til it’s over

Failing to follow the correct procedure for dismissing an employee can mean that the employment contract continues, with potentially costly consequences, warns Tom Custance The obvious lesson from this case for employers is to ensure that they properly implement contractual termination provisions.On 19 December 2012 the Supreme Court delivered its judgment in Société Générale, London …
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