Legal news
Employment Law Reforms on the way! - 9th January 2012
Government’s plans to reform employment law in 2012
In April 2011 the government launched its “Red Tape Challenge” a wide-ranging project reviewing 21,000 statutory instruments in order to indentify which existing regulations could be “scrapped, merged, simplified or improved”.
The focus on reforming employment law is to assist business and boost economic recovery by encouraging employment disputes to be resolved earlier, without the need for tribunals and to achieve a “swift, user-friendly and effective” tribunal system. Key changes on the government agenda include increasing the qualifying period for unfair dismissal to two years; making it easier for employers and employees to have frank discussions and resolve disputes; overhauling the employment tribunal system; extending flexible working to all and reviewing collective redundancy requirements and TUPE 2006.
As a result in November 2011 Vince Cable, Business Secretary, announced a number of proposals to reform employment law. As a result the government has stated that it intends to bring into force a number of its planned changes in April 2012. These include:
- unfair dismissal – increasing the qualifying period from 1 to 2 years, however it is still unclear whether this new qualifying period will apply to existing employees or only new joiners;
- deposit orders – the amount of deposit order a tribunal will be able to order a party pay will increase from £500 to £1,000;
- cost awards- the maximum amount of costs an employment tribunal can award (without referring the case to the county court for detailed assessment) will increase from £10,000 to £20,000;
- witness statements- these will be taken as read in the tribunal, unless a judge directs otherwise;
- witness expenses – tribunals will be given powers to direct parties to bear the costs of witness attendance, including the costs of witnesses called by the successful party. The government will withdraw state-funded expenses; and
- judges to sit alone on unfair dismissal cases- unfair dismissal cases in the tribunal will be heard by a judge sitting alone without lay members. Progress on this change will be reviewed after a year.
In addition, although there is currently no implementation date, the government intends to introduce early Acas conciliation, whereby employees will be required to submit details of their dispute to Acas first, at which point they will be offered pre-claim conciliation for a 1 month period. If it is refused by either party, or is unsuccessful the employee will be able to go ahead and present their claim to the tribunal. If the parties enter into pre-claim conciliation this will “stop the clock” on the limitation period to present the claim to the tribunal.
There are other proposals which are currently being considered, which include:
- introducing Tribunal Fees;
- review of flexible parental leave, flexible working and annual leave legislation to make them more suitable for the modern workplace;
- introduction of protected conversations;
- reducing the collective redundancy consultation period from 90 days to 60,45 or even 30 days;
- compensated no fault dismissals for businesses with 10 or fewer employees; and
- simplifying the dismissal procedure to make it a quicker and cleaner process.
For more information about Employment Law Reforms, sign up to receive our regular Employment Law updates or contact a member of our Employment Team.
