In Tillman v Egon Zehnder Ltd, the Supreme Court, in the first such case for 100 years, has overturned the Court of Appeal decision that a restrictive covenant under which a senior employee agreed not...
Background checks – what an employer can and cannot do
Employers are experiencing more and more requests from their clients to ensure they have carried out certain types of background checks on their workforce. US companies starting up in the UK are used ...
European Court of Human Rights holds that employer’s reading of employee’s private messages at work is lawful
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that an employer was within its rights to sack a Romanian engineer after discovering that he had used a work Yahoo messaging account to correspond with his...
Travelling time for workers with no fixed workplace counts as ‘working time’
In Federación de Servicios Privados del Sindicato Comisiones Obreras v Tyco Integrated Security SL (TIS), the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has held that, for workers who do not have a fixed or hab...
New Acas guides on discrimination at work
To help employers identify, tackle and prevent discrimination in the workplace, Acas has recently published three new guides. Although the Acas guides are not strictly legally binding, businesses are ...
Employment Law Changes on 5 April 2015 and beyond
Some significant changes to employment law occur on 5 April 2015, mainly in the area of family leave. The headline news is the introduction of shared parental leave but various other changes will al...
Court ruling that holiday pay includes overtime
The Employment Appeal Tribunal has given judgment in the three joined together cases of Bear Scotland Ltd v Fulton, Hertel (UK) Ltd v Woods and Amec Group Ltd v Law on whether average overtime should ...
Mandatory Pre-Claim Conciliation
With effect from 6 May 2014, there is a change to the way employees can start proceedings against their employer in the Employment Tribunal. Claimants are first required to contact ACAS (Advisory Co...
Employment law changes from 6 April 2014
A number of changes to UK employment law took effect from 6 April 2014. The most notable is the introduction of an Acas conciliation service that will be a prerequisite to any person wanting to bri...
Consultation on revision to Acas Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedure
Acas has launched a consultation on a revision to the Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures to reflect the Employment Appeal Tribunal’s recent decision in Toal and anor v GB ...