Here is a quick glimpse behind the scenes of parliamentary process – some highlights from the Parliamentary Treasury Committee meeting yesterday when officials from HMRC were quizzed by the Committee about the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, plus some thoughts of our own in bold. The new scheme will be up and running on 20 April … Continue Reading
They do say that maternity in the workplace can be an unsettling and confusing time, leaving you confronting new questions and situations that no one has really prepared you for, and where the guidance comes at you from a range of sources as wide as they are inconsistent. Anyway, enough about employers.… Continue Reading
At the end of my post on Maternity Action’s report on unfair redundancies, I mentioned a number of the reasons why many recent mothers do not raise complaints about their perceived treatment at the hands of their employer. These included a fear of creating bad feeling with their employer or colleagues, a lack of information, … Continue Reading
Back in March 2016 I posted a piece querying the headlines over an Equalities and Human Rights Commission report on maternity and pregnancy discrimination at work. The short point was that the report did not justify the apocalyptic headlines about the treatment of women who were pregnant or on maternity leave. Looked at close up, … Continue Reading
You know it’s time to re-issue your employment legislation when the nearest available section number for the insertion of an amendment into the Employment Rights Act is Section 171ZZ. Though it might sound like a bottom-rank Star Wars droid, that little fellow is actually the proposed product of a new Bill on time off work for … Continue Reading
General Elections. Don’t they seem to come round more frequently than they used to? A tough call for voters, this particular one, not just because of economist JK Galbraith’s wise words above but also because the outcome won’t make the slightest difference to the biggest issue of the day, the terms on which we are … Continue Reading
Managing redundancy for those on maternity leave Many employers get nervous when carrying out redundancy exercises if the selection pool includes a woman who is pregnant or on maternity leave. The risk of a claim for discrimination or an unfair dismissal claim if she is made redundant is often on their mind. The fact that … Continue Reading
The last few weeks have seen a number of press articles on women’s pay and their under-representation at senior management levels. This was prompted by a study carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research, which suggests that a key factor may be increasing childcare costs. This reinforces a culture of women, rather than … Continue Reading
Readers may have been seen BBC1’s Panorama programme earlier this week, which touched, amongst other things, on the so-called “bump plan.” Details of this entirely legal tax strategy came to be heard in unfortunate circumstances for a very highly regarded member of the tax profession, who has subsequently resigned his position on the GAAR panel- … Continue Reading
Would be grateful for your help on this one, please. On its first day live, we are delighted to see our new Employment Law Cloud app rocket up the rankings to a terrific 11th place in the iTunes app store business section. Now we just need to get it into the Top Ten, which is … Continue Reading
The great British Summer has come and gone once more (one morning last week, I think, but I may have missed it), still no British winner at Wimbledon and only England’s cricketers striking a jarring note by actually winning something. So what else is new? Every cloud has a silver lining, and Squire Sanders Hammonds … Continue Reading
