• Printer-friendly

An interesting development on the old employment relations front this week with the announcement of a new statutory code of practice concerning, well, that strictly remains to be seen. Scarcely able to stand up under the weight of politically-charged invective and hyperbole, the government’s statement refers to “clamping down” on “unscrupulous employers” which fail to engage in meaningful consultation with employees before issuing notices of termination, seemingly whether they are then re-hired or not. So far we have only the announcement rushed out to capitalise on the obvious political dish of the day but no actual code, so beyond a proposed 25% uplift in compensation for failure to abide by the new code, details of exactly what it will cover or how it will work remain unclear, in fact actively obscure. It is hard to think that it can go much further than a more toothy re-hash of the recent Acas guidance on fire-and-rehire practices. This says essentially that the practice should be a last resort after you have fought your way through all the different grievance, failure-to-agree and industrial dispute levels in your collective agreements, consulted to infinity and beyond and then consulted a bit more.

It may be better that we are spared the details for the time being, since although it is obviously spurred by events at P&O, the intended code seems to suffer from one overriding problem, being that the law already roundly penalises employers which...

Read Full Story: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/new-code-practice-employers-failure-to-c...