Government has started making changes to EU laws
Applies to England, Scotland, Wales
We knew that Brexit meant that the Government could remove or change current laws because we don’t have to stick to what the EU do anymore.
And now it’s all happening….
The Government has released a full list of all the laws that will be removed at the end of this year. There are no main employment laws in that list.
But it is going to make changes to some existing laws:
Holidays and working hours
- Rolled up holiday pay is to be re-instated. This practice – where employers can add a bit more money onto hourly pay to represent holiday pay and then not have to pay workers when they actually take holiday – is currently unlawful. It will be useful for workers who do ad hoc hours like zero hours workers.
- The 5.6 week annual leave minimum is currently split into 2 elements – the 4 week EU leave and the 1.6 week domestic leave. The distinction will be removed and all 5.6 weeks will be treated in the same way. This could mean that some case law judgments won’t apply anymore, like how much annual leave can be carried over when someone is on long term sick leave
- And employers won’t have to keep such detailed records on working hours
TUPE
- More businesses will be able to swerve the complicated and time consuming process of electing employee reps when doing a TUPE transfer.
- Right now, only businesses with fewer than 10 staff can miss out this otherwise required element
- The changes mean that businesses with fewer than 50 staff and where the TUPE affects less than 10 staff won’t have to elect reps
Non-compete clauses
- Many businesses don’t allow their ex-employees to go and work for a competitor for a certain period after they have left, and they use a ‘non-compete clause’ in a restrictive covenant to do that
- The Government will limit that period to 3 months
Key takeaways:
- No main employment laws are being removed which means, generally, employment law will still be as tricky as it always was
- Some major employment laws are being changed
- Some things are getting easier – if employers don’t know about them, they’ll keep doing things the hard way when they didn’t have to! Spending more time and money than needed
- Some things are getting rules that were never there before – restrictive covenants will have to be reviewed and changed so that they aren’t unlawful
