At 22nd June 2006 there were 22 Bills with employment law relevance either already introduced in Parliament or at an advanced stage of preparation.
Notes on all employment law related Bills and prospective Bills (plus recently enacted Bills and employment law related Acts of Parliament) are provided from the links below, together with an archive of recent dropped and lapsed employment law related Bills.
Summaries of all cases reported in the ICR and IRLR law reports since end 1999 are now available. All cases reported in ICR 2006 parts 1 to 7 and in IRLR 2006 vol 35 nos 1 to 7 are now noted/summarised and short commentary is provided. This is in addition to summaries and/or headnotes of more than 1,500 other employment cases, new and old. For most new cases there are direct links to free versions of the full judgments on the internet.
The idea is to adopt a "stick and carrot" approach towards persuading people that it is financially worth working but at the same time ensuring adequate cash benefits to those who genuinely cannot work. The Bill makes provision for a new "Employment Support Allowance" to replace Incapacity Benefit. Along with a new "Personal Capability Assessment", this is intended to give individuals more incentive to get into appropriate work. The Bill will also provide more power to tackle benefit fraud by strengthening the "two strikes" rules so that people who commit a second benefit offence within five years (rather than just 3 years) of their first one can have their benefit withdrawn.
The Health Bill received Royal Assent as the Health Act 2006 on 19th July 2006. A consultation document which includes three sets of draft regulations covering the detail of the anti-tobacco-smoking proposals in the current Health Bill was issued on 17th July 2006. Consultation ends on 9th October. The names of the draft regulations describe their content: the Smoke-free (General Provisions) Regulations, the Smoke-free (Exemptions and Vehicles) Regulations and the Smoke-free (Penalties and Discounted Amounts) Regulations.
It is clear that under UK law people, such as carers or parents, who are not themselves disabled but who are discriminated against by their employers by reason of association with a disabled person cannot claim protection under the Disability Discrimination Act. This follows from the definitions of "discrimination" and of "employment" in the Act. There is a question as to whether this means that UK law is not properly implementing the Equal Treatment Framework Directive 2000/78/EC. In July 2006 this question has been referred to the ECJ by the Croydon Employment Tribunal for consideration in a constructive dismissal/disabioity discrimination case called Coleman v Attrridge Law.
As is well known the new anti-age discrimination law comes into force on 1st October. Any failure to handle recruitment AND/OR retirement processes correctly will be likely to land employers (and partners in partnerships) in serious trouble. The 65 age limit for Unfair Dismissal will be abolished and employers will have to give formal advance written notice spelling out statutory rights to those who are about to retire (in particular, the complicated transitional provisions applying between October 2006 and April 2007 are a minefield). All employers, reagrdless of size, are affected and if procedures have not already been updated ADVICE should be taken without delay.
Two less well known, related matters of interest are:
A hotel manager was required to sleep over several nights a week, mainly to cover for possible emergencies (fire, flood etc). He was paid on an hourly basis. He claimed that failure to pay him for his sleeping time was breach of contract (he did not bring his claim under the Working Time or Minimum Wage regulations). After reviewing the authorities, the EAT has held that in law an employee can be regarded as working even although he is asleep and will be so regarded if the place where he is sleeping is his employer’s premises and the reason he is sleeping there is that his employer requires him to be in those premises for the employer’s purposes (Anderson v Jarvis Hotels Plc, judgment published 14th July 2006). The implications are wide - for example although the Minimum Wage Regulations provide an exemption for resident home helps this is subject to conditions and would not normally cover, for example, a baby sitter.
Under current law a company can only be convicted of corporate manslaughter if there is enough evidence to find a single senior person guilty. Only seven small organisations have been convicted. The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill (both names are needed as the new law will cover Scotland as well as England) introduced in the House of Commons on 21st July 2006 will create a new criminal offence which is meant to address the problem by enabling the courts to consider the overall picture of how an organisation's activities were managed by its senior managers, rather than focusing on the actions of one individual. Prosecution of individuals will not be possible under the Bill, which is seen by some as a glaring deficiency.
The House of Lords has confirmed the 2005 decision by the Court of Appeal that the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 is effective to create what the original judge in the case referred to as "another level of liability in employment law" (Majrowski v Guy's & St Thomas's NHS Trust House of Lords on 12th July 2006).
Mr Majrowski, who is gay, and his superior, Ms Sandra Freeman, were both employed by the Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Trust in London. Mr Majrowski claimed that Ms Freeman was abusive to him in front of colleagues and he sued the hospital trust. At first instance his claim failed, essentially because there had been no negligence on the part of the hospital and the judge considered the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 could not be called in aid, but Mr Majrowski won on appeal. His success has now been confirmed by the House of Lords. The effect is that, by using the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, it is now possible for a victim successfully to sue an employer for workplace harassment by an employee of that employer, even though there was no negligence on the part of the employer.
Hundreds, probably thousands, of wokers who were exposed to asbestos dust years ago are now suffering. Some worked in several different employments (or even self employment) where there was exposure to asbestos dust. In such cases, because there is absolutely no way of knowing which of perhaps several different negligent employers were responsible, the House of Lords ruled that liability should be apportioned between the various employers responsible for wrongful exposure (or their insurers) according to their relative degree of contribution to the chance of the person contracting the disease (calculated in practice by time apportionment). This decision was greeted with horror by many, including the government (which at one time, wearing its hat as employer took the opposite view), not least because in some cases some of the employers had gone into liquidation.
In the event, the government has decided to reverse the House of Lords ruling. New clauses added to the Compensation Bill, which was not designed for this purpose but which fortuitously is now on its way through Parliament, will make each of the various employers or their insurers 100% jointly and severally liable. It will of course be open for an employer or insurer who is unjustly forced to pay "too much" to seek contribution from the other various employers if they are still in existence.