Welcome to the February 2013 edition of Employment Eye our monthly newsletter with information on the latest employment law developments and how they should be implemented.
This month’s news round-up is brought to you by Alastair Currie and includes the latest news on: TUPE (whether it is ‘static’ or ‘dynamic’); whistleblowing; changes to unfair dismissal as a result of the recent BNP case on politically motivated dismissals; details of new guidance following the recent Eweida case on religious discrimination; and details of new developments on collective redundancy, family friendly rights and settlement agreements.
In a follow-up to our recent alert on the report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Inquiry, Julian Hoskins discusses the practical impact of the report on workforce issues, in a Q&A with Carlton Sadler - the Bevan Brittan Senior Associate who led the team advising one of the core participants in the Inquiry, the Care Quality Commission.
In
Lockwood v Department of Work and Pensions, the Employment Appeal Tribunal has confirmed that an enhanced redundancy payment for older workers did not amount to direct age discrimination, when objectively justified by a strong social policy objective. In this case, the strong social policy objective was the provision of a 'financial cushion' for older workers that reflected the extra difficulties they experienced after losing their jobs. George Pennington explains more.
Welcome to the January 2013 edition of Employment Eye our monthly newsletter with information on the latest employment law developments and how they should be implemented.
Diets, detox and developments in employment law have been on the agenda for many this January. It seems unlikely that the government’s ‘one-in two-out’ approach to legislation (effective from this month) will allow any let up this year especially, given the volume of reforms already on the agenda. So, in 2013, the pace of change will be fast, but Julian Hoskins’ tracker of the key changes chalked up for this year will help keep you up to speed.
The European Court of Human Rights has handed down its long awaited decision in four joined cases on religious discrimination in the workplace. The Court reached two opposite conclusions on similar facts relating to the right to wear religious symbols at work; and has also looked at balancing competing rights to religious freedom and equality of sexual orientation. Sarah Michael explains more.
One problem we never have at BB Towers is finding content for our monthly update, and this month is no exception. The Government has been busy publishing details of a major reforms to the TUPE Regulations; the Public Sector Equality Duty is set to change and new guidance is published; the latest employment tribunal statistics are out; and the Court of Appeal has handed down an important decision on discrimination compensation. We also have details of our series of client seminars on ‘lessons learned’ from the Mid Staffordshire Public Inquiry by Robert Francis QC, which is due to report on 6 February 2013.
The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement 2012 addresses the Government's review of PFI and we welcome the Government’s support for infrastructure projects as a means to reinvigorate our public services and infrastructure while creating jobs and driving economic recovery in the UK. In this article we examine a number of questions which naturally arise from the PF2 proposals.
We are holding a PF2 workshop on 17 January 2013 which will discuss these issues in greater detail.
Welcome to our December 2012 edition of Employment Eye with the latest on employment law developments. In this issue we cover the following topics:
- The law of unintended consequences: TUPE service provision changes
- If I've told you once, I've told you twice....a misconduct update
- Employment news round-up, December 2012