Recruitment: Financial penalties for CV fraud

Gareth Edwards explores the implications of a recent Supreme Court case in which a former hospice boss who faked his qualifications and experience was ordered to pay nearly £100,000 to the Crown If an employer suspects or discovers that an employee has obtained employment by committing CV fraud, normal criminal, civil and employment law principles…

Age discrimination: Lessons from recent cases following six-fold surge in claims

John Bracken analyses three cases which highlight some of the perils employers face when making management decisions about older members of their workforce Whether employers are making redundancy, promotion or more general day-to-day decisions, they should not disregard the risk of age discrimination simply because the employees concerned are of fairly similar ages. Age discrimination…

Immigration: Right-to-work checks and balances

As the Covid-19 adjusted process for right-to-work checks ends, Samar Shams explains which checking processes employers need to use now for UK and non-UK nationals If an employer conducts a right-to-work check in the manner dictated by the Home Office, it can establish a statutory excuse against being liable for a penalty should it be…

Working Time Regulations: What is the correct way to calculate holiday pay?

Following on from her article last month on Harpur Trust v Brazel, Joanne Moseley reviews the impact that other key cases have had on how much holiday pay workers are entitled to receive Since workers must not be discouraged from taking leave, the pay they receive while absent must generally correspond to what they would…

Privacy: Understand the legal pitfalls of monitoring remote employees

Rachel Tozer looks at the issues employers need to work through to help them decide whether electronic staff surveillance is justified An employer needs to be careful about treating one group of employees (such as remote workers) differently to another group (such as office-based workers). Recent reports that the Cabinet Office hopes to persuade civil…

Demystifying employment contracts: Beyond the basics

Sophie Rothwell concludes our series with a look at some of the optional clauses employers may wish to include in their contracts to reduce the risk of future employment disputes Where a contract contains both a garden leave clause and post-termination restrictions, employers and advisers should consider the length of the two together when assessing…

Manorial title: Reconstructing title

Paul Stafford considers whether it’s possible for a purchaser to acquire rights that a vendor was unaware of when buying manorial lordship titlesLand which has been in continuous ownership since before 13 October 2013 may be subject to lordship rights belonging to a lord whom the owner of the land has no way of knowing…

Construction focus: A solution to a problem or a problem in itself?

Polly Streather explores the use and benefit of pre-contract tools, such as letters of intent, in trying to alleviate the strain of increasing construction prices and highlights the risks that should be considered by employers before entering into such arrangementsOnce the letter of intent is in place, there is sometimes a temptation for contractors to…

The Commercial Rent (Coronavirus) Act 2022: Winners and losers

Shanna Davison and Matthew Bonye analyse the Covid commercial rent arrears arbitration scheme introduced under the 2022 Act and whether interference with the fundamental principle of freedom of contract has paid offThe idea is to encourage reasonable proposals from each party on the footing that these are more likely to result in settlement without involvement…

Competing equities: A thorny issue

Mark Pawlowski takes a critical look at the first in time rule as a means of resolving the problem of competing estoppel equitiesWhere all are equally innocent, priority, as we have seen, is determined by the order at which the equities arose in time. But the position is different where the equities are not equal.…