The Appeal Tribunal ruled last week on the question of dismissals for Some Other Substantial Reason (SOSR). SOSR is a category of justifiable dismissal just like misconduct or poor performance. However, it is a catch all category for dismissals that do not fall into the other main categories. For this...

A quick reminder that with the introduction of the Shared Parental Leave rules, it is vital that employers have an up to date policy dealing with the rights. The reason this is so important is that there are very strict criteria that must be met if an employee’s request is...

There has been a slight change to the law on unfair dismissal when looking at previous warnings. Prior to this case, the general position is that if a previous warning was not appealed by the employee at the time, the Tribunal would not revisit the matter.  In short, the employer...

  The Government have announced the latest rates for the national minimum wage, which will come into effect from 1 October 2015. The biggest rise is for apprentices. Despite the Low Pay Commission recommending a 7p rise (which would have been a 2.5% increase), the Government has said it will...

The ACAS code for the conduct of Disciplinary or Grievance hearings has been updated following an Appeal ruling in January. Most will not notice any change, but the code now specifies that an employee may be accompanied by anyone they choose as long as they are a trade union official,...

The Court of Appeal looked at whether an employer needs to investigate every single defence to an accusation of misconduct before deciding to dismiss. In this case, an employee was dismissed for claiming double the mileage on business trips than the AA said would be involved in the same journeys....

The High Court ruled last week that an employer could dismiss an employee for an act of Gross Misconduct over five years old. The employee was a football manager, in fact he was manager of Leeds United. He was served notice of redundancy, and his notice was worth £200,000. The...

Interesting reading from the Appeal Tribunal (EAT) as they overturn a rather inexplicable unfair dismissal decision by a tribunal. In this case, the employee was the manager in charge of limiting risk for the 100 stores owned by this employer. He set up a Twitter feed that could be seen...

A Court of Appeal case recently published has highlighted a problem which is more common than one would think, that being employees who are signed off sick but doing other work while getting sick pay. Helpfully the decision can be summarised very briefly. The Appeal Court has ruled that employees...

There has been some speculation since last month as to how far back employees can claim unlawful deductions where the employer has not included voluntary overtime in the holiday pay. This matter has now been resolved with the government rushing through a piece of legislation (The Deductions from Wages (Limitation)...