Employment Law Updates

As an employer, it is your duty to ensure employees feel comfortable at their place of work.  Scope, a charity for individuals with a disability, reports that there are 13.3 million disabled people in the UK, at least 18% of those are adults of a working age. It was further reported that 3.4 million disabled […]

The festive excitement that makes people happy in December comes to a crash in January when everyone has to return to work. Christmas is now just a distant memory, January can therefore be perceived as the most depressing month of the year. According to the Metro, the third Monday in January is ‘Blue Monday’ – […]

(1)    Discrimination based on a perceived disability found as unlawful In the case of Chief Constable of Norfolk v Coffey, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) upheld the decision made in the Employment Tribunal that a police officer did suffer direct discrimination because of a perceived disability. This came after Lisa Coffey’s employer refused her a transfer as there […]

(1)  General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) By now, everyone should have a basic awareness on what GDPR represents and what this means going forward. The GDPR is a regulation implemented by the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission and is intended to unify and strengthen data protection for all individuals […]

Over the last year, employment law headlines have been dominated by case law developments on employment status, annual leave, religious dress in the workplace and shared parental leave. In July, the UK saw one of the most significant employment law decisions of the last 50 years; tribunal fees were found as unlawful. (1)  R (on the […]

Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998 provides that all individuals have the right to respect for private and family life. Therefore, would video surveillance of lecture theatres violate a university professor’s right to privacy? This issue was recently highlighted in the case of Antovic & Mirkovic v Montenegro, in which the Dean of the School […]

The Government have confirmed that following low referral rates, the national fit for work referral scheme will be scrapped in England and Wales on 31st March 2018 and on 31st May in Scotland. Fit for work is a Government funded initiative that was implemented in 2015 with the hope of providing support to individuals in work with […]

One question often asked by employers at this time of year is whether they are obliged to pay its employees a Christmas bonus if they have done so in earlier years. Are employers legally obliged to pay their staff a Christmas bonus? Each case is different – In the first instance, employers should check the […]