Employment Law Latest

Essential for HR and people managers, this part of the seminar will focus on critical employment law updates, including new and important legislation, Government reforms and emerging case law, with ample opportunity for questions and discussion.  

Key topics for this year will include:

1) Retained EU Law (Reform and Revocation) Bill

The Government recently identified around 600 laws that it intends to revoke by the end of the year and any laws not on the list will remain binding in the UK after 31 December 2023. To date, it does not appear that any significant employment laws are being scrapped but we will discuss whether any of the planned changes will have implications for employers. 

 2) Employment Bill 

The Queen’s Speech in 2019 announced the Employment Bill, aimed at supporting workers and families by introducing various employment rights and enhancing existing ones. There has been little progress, but recently several private member bills have been introduced to deal with some of the Bills set out in 2019. Five Bills currently under review are;

Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill

Requirement to have 26 weeks service to make a request will be abolished and it will become a Day 1 employment right plus other changes to flexible working rules.

Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Bill

This Bill proposes to introduce new employment leave and pay rights for employees of parents of babies that are admitted into hospital as a neonate.  

Carer’s Leave Bill

The Carer’s Leave Bill would give employees who are unpaid carers the statutory right to take up to one week (5 working days) of unpaid leave per year.

Protection from Redundancy (Pregnancy and Family Leave) Bill

This Bill, if introduced, would extend existing legislation that provides employees on maternity leave greater employment rights in a redundancy situation than other staff.

Employment (Allocation of Tips) Bill

This Bill would enable workers to receive tips, gratuities and service charges paid by customers that are earned in full, and employers would be required to pass on all tips without deduction.

 3) Strikes & Agency Workers

The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, is currently going through parliament and, if passed, would mandate employees working in six sectors (including health and transport) to provide a minimum level of service when there is strike action. Meanwhile, legal changes proposed by the Government in 2022 to let agency staff fill in for striking workers have been now been quashed by the high court, who labelled it as “irrational”. We will update you on the latest developments. 

 4) Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill

This Bill, if passed, would amend the parts of the Equality Act 2010 that deal with harassment. Specifically, to place a legal duty on employers to prevent the sexual harassment of its employees, and place liability on employers for harassment of its employees by third parties. We will discuss the implications.

 5) A Tweak to TUPE

To attempt to simplify the TUPE process, the Government proposes to allow businesses with fewer than 50 employees to consult directly with employees, rather than with employee representatives and to allow businesses of any size to consult directly with employees, rather than with employee representatives, but only where fewer than 10 employees are actually being transferred under TUPE. We will update you on all aspects of this proposal.

 6) Restricting non-compete restrictions

In May the Government also announced proposals in relation to non-compete restrictions including the suggestion that non-compete restrictions in Employment Contracts are to be limited in duration to 3 months post-employment. We will look at the full set of proposals and the impact they may have.

 7) Data protection

The Government intends to replace the UK GDPR with a British data protection system in the form of a Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. We will review this and also look at two key consultations the ICO are running on monitoring workers and on processing workers’ health data. 

 8) Holiday Pay – What’s new?

Earlier this year the Government carried out a consultation on how best to calculate holiday pay for workers on irregular hours or part year and are expected to publish recommendations “in due course”. The Government has also agreed to allow employers to roll-up holiday pay as long as the employee is aware of this and is looking at merging holiday so that there is just one type of leave (rather than the current two). Finally, the Government plans to allow employers to pro-rate holiday for term time and casual workers but have not yet finalised how they will do this. All to be discussed.

 9) AI

We will look at some ways that AI is changing HR departments and cover areas such as the rise in the use of Chat GPT. AI can be a very useful tool, but is it going to take the “human” out of human resources?

 10) High-profile Cases

We will assess how important emerging case law will influence HR procedures going forward.

Round Up

In this section we will cover items such as the new code of practice regarding “Hire and Refire” (following the P&O Ferries redundancy handling), plans to abolish the requirement for businesses to record staff working hours under Working Time Regulations, new ICO guidance on handling SARs, new ACAS guidance on reasonable adjustments and finally a look at handling staff who take second jobs.