Employment and HR

A Guide to Dealing with Requests for Flexible Working Arrangements
From 6 April 2009, the statutory right to request flexible working arrangements has been extended to parents of children aged 16 and under. Employees with caring responsibilities for children aged up to 6 (18 and under where the child is disabled) and carers...
Collective Redundancy Consultation
Employers should be aware of the potentially serious financial consequences of failing to consult when making collective redundancies. If an employer is proposing to make redundant 20 or more employees at one establishment within a period of 90 days or...
Compromise Agreements
As a general rule, ‘out of court settlements’ of employment disputes are not legally binding in that they cannot exclude an employee's right to take the matter concerned to an Employment Tribunal (ET). A formal compromise agreement is one of the...
Compromise Agreements - Tax Position Clarified
A compromise agreement is an agreement made between an employer and an employee who is having their contract of employment terminated. It sets out the terms under which the termination will take place and contains a provision that the employee will receive a...
Controlling Director Is an Employee
A controlling shareholder of a company who is also a director can also be an employee for the purposes of employment protection law. In Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) v 1. Richard Neufeld and 2. Keith Howe , the...
Dealing with Employee Absence
Employee absences can be both costly and disruptive. It is advisable to have systems in place to measure and analyse these costs so that you can identify problem areas. Are there patterns of absence? Does a particular department have a below average record?...
Deliberate Failure to Pay the Minimum Wage
The owners of a Sheffield butcher's shop have been ordered to pay more than £11,000 to two former employees because they failed to pay them the National Minimum Wage (NMW). This is the fourth successful NMW prosecution to date but it is the first in...
Drug Policy - Recognising the Signs and What to Do
Research findings from Medscreen, based on drug testing carried out over the last ten years across a variety of professions, reveal that there has been a 3,000 per cent increase in the number of workers testing positive for cocaine. More than five per cent...
False Claims on a CV - What to Do
According to research by the Risk Advisory Group, more than half of CVs submitted by job applicants contain lies or inaccuracies. These range from gaps in employment history to false claims regarding qualifications and failure to mention fraud committed...
Get the Christmas Party Right
It’s that time of year again. Love them or hate them, the invitations to office Christmas parties will be arriving soon if they haven’t already. For employers, parties pose a particular threat. Here are some tips on making sure your...
Health and Safety - VDU Use
More and more workers are spending a large part of their day looking at a computer screen. The Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992 specifically deal with the health and safety issues associated with working with VDUs. The Health...
Health and Safety Breaches - Penalties
The Health and Safety Offences Act 2008 received Royal Assent on 16 October 2008 and came into force on 1 January 2009. It amends Section 33 of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and has increased penalties for breaches of health and safety...
Recruitment - Preventing Illegal Working Without Discrimination
Hardly a day goes by without there being some mention of illegal immigration in the news. The number of people discovered working here unlawfully has risen sharply in recent years. There has been much talk of the possible introduction of a national identity...
Stress - An Employer's Duties
Dealing with stress in the workplace is a difficult issue for employers. As well as specific duties under health and safety legislation, employers owe their employees a common law duty to take reasonable care to safeguard their health and safety and this...
TUPE Regulations - A Brief Guide
The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE) apply to any size of business and protect the employment rights of employees when their employer changes as a result of the relevant transfer of a business or a part of one. They...
The Corporate Manslaughter Act
On 6 April 2008 most of the long-awaited Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 came into force. The Act established a new statutory offence of corporate manslaughter (corporate culpable homicide in Scotland). An organisation is guilty of...
Written Statement of Employment Particulars
A contract of employment may be verbal but all employees, whether part-time or full-time, are entitled by law to be given a written statement setting out the main particulars of their employment, provided their employment lasts for one month or more. All the...