As an employer you are required to give your employee notice unless of course they have committed an act of gross misconduct. Notice can be worked, served out on garden leave or paid in lieu depending on the terms of the contract. Unfortunately not all employees give the required length of notice or any notice […]
Sarah King Employment Solicitor
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News – Contracts and Pay
Restrictive covenants on appeal
You may recall my post some months ago about the widening of restrictive covenants by the Court. The court added words into the covenant to give it a commercially sensible result. If not here is a reminder: Restrictive Covenants Well the case has been overturned on appeal. The Court of Appeal has held in Prophet […]
Employment Practices Bill
The Employment Practices Bill 2014-15 has been published in draft. The bill has been little publicised and has been introduced in an attempt to tackle the potential exploitation of migrant workers but applies to all employers and workers. The main provision of the Bill relates to employers who offer an employee residential accommodation as part of […]
Flexible working
The new rules regarding flexible working came into force on 30th June 2014. Now all employees with 26 weeks service have the right to request to work flexible. Prior to this they had to be the parent or responsible for a child or disabled child or be a carer. Employers can also sigh relief at […]
Confidentiality in employment
In what appears to be one of the few times that a judge has felt justified in allowing the inspection and imaging of employees’ computers in the case of Warm Zones v Thurley and another, the High Court has ordered that an employer may instruct an independent computer expert to inspect and take images from […]
Flexible working for all
On 30th June 2014, the new rules concerning flexible working come into force. Employees still have to have 26 week’s service to make a request but no longer need to have parenting or caring responsibilities as they have done in the past. The request simply need to be made in writing, dated and state whether […]
Employment Status
Two recent cases have impacted on the law of employment status. Firstly, in the case of Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills v Knight, the Employment Appeal Tribunal held that an employee for the purposes of the Employment Rights Act 1996 did not have to receive pay in order to gain that status. […]
Recovering benefit overpayments from earnings
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has a new means of recovering money owed to it by those formerly in receipt of benefits. The DWP can now issue a Direct Earnings Attachment (DEA) notice instructing an employer to make deductions from an employee’s earnings without the need for DWP to obtain a Court Order […]
Restrictive Covenants
There is a familiar legal concept, which is that the Court can delete parts of a restriction to make it enforceable. The High Court has taken this a step further in the recent decision of Prophet Plc v Huggett [2014] where the Court read words into the restrictive covenant to produce a commercially sensible result. […]
Flexible Working rights extended
The current position is that only workers with children (or responsible for them) or those with caring responsibilities have the right to request to work flexibly. It is important to note that this is not a right to get the flexible working but merely a right to request it, as this is a common misconception. There […]
(Our news section brings you the latest news on published judgments and cases which are all in the public domain. We only comment on these published cases and not cases of our actual clients. Publication of the case or comments is a public service designed to make the courts and tribunals more accessible and ensures justice is seen to be done. This is why court and tribunal judgments are published publicly.)