January 2017 news

Happy New Year and welcome to our first Newsletter of 2017. We hope you are all surviving the cold and managing to still maintain just one or two of your New Year’s resolutions. If one of those resolutions is to keep more up to date with HR/employment law news then we can help with that and this month we have updates on the gender pay gap and the apprenticeship levy, plus guidance from ACAS on social exclusion, a revised code of practice on industrial action and a template eligibility letter from Access to Work.

In our first case update of the year we look at the rules for re-engagement in unfair dismissal cases, when mobility clauses can be relied on and whether type 2 diabetes can be a disability.

What Simon has been doing recently…

My month has been taken up largely with drafting and advising on settlement agreements, although not the same agreements obviously! The question we get asked a lot by clients is when is the best time to introduce a settlement agreement? My view is that the best approach is to progress sufficiently far down whatever process upon which you are engaged so that it is clear that dismissal could result. This is so that when the employee is considering what their options are with their solicitor you have put sufficient doubt in their minds about the risks to them of rejecting the offer and either demanding a lot more money or refusing to sign at all.

As an aside confidential/without prejudice discussions are dealt with in Anne-Marie’s splendid blog with Part 2 coming soon.

• Government reforms (1): Gender Pay Gap
• Government reforms (2): Apprenticeship levy
• New guidance: 1. ACAS Guidance on Social Exclusion
• New guidance: 2. Revised Code of Practice on Industrial action
• New guidance: 3. Access to Work: Eligibility letter published
• Case update (1): Unfair dismissal – re-engagement
• Case update (2): Redundancy – reliance on mobility clauses
• Case update (3): Disability discrimination – Type 2 diabetes