Backhouse Blog

In a grand finale to the long running legal battle between Unison and the UK Government, the Supreme Court has today found in favour of Unison and ruled that Employment Tribunal fees are unlawful. Background Employment Tribunal fees were introduced on 29 July 2013 by the [...]

In this day and age, there is an increasing tendency to spend long hours in the office and therefore it is easy to see why personal relationships and not just friendships are forged in the workplace. There are no explicit laws governing such workplace relationships in [...]

Nowadays employees have come to accept that monitoring in the workplace is a routine part of the employer/employee relationship.  Most employers will conduct some form of checks whether on the quality of work produced by their workforce or to ensure that health and safety regulations are [...]

Research recently conducted by Citizens Advice has revealed that a staggering 50% of people on zero hours contracts wrongly assume they are not entitled to paid holiday. The research suggested that some employers were unwittingly misleading staff as a result of their own ignorance but others [...]

With Eid Al Fitr taking place this week we look at employment issues experienced by Muslims in the UK today. As early as 2014 the Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey found that British Muslims faced the worst job discrimination of any minority group. Little [...]

April is always an important month for employment law and this year was no exception.  Here we outline the new regulations introduced this year as well as other recent important changes: National Minimum Wage – Effective from 6th April, the National Minimum Wage increased as follows: [...]

As Pride month approaches, our employment law team takes a look at transgender discrimination in the workplace and in particular what employers can do to avoid such behaviour. What is Transgender Discrimination? Transgender people are those whose personal identity or gender does not correspond with their [...]

An Employment Tribunal has recently ruled that a beauty therapist was unfairly dismissed and suffered sex discrimination after she was made redundant following a row over childcare arrangements. The employee had worked at a fitness centre for almost 10 years and had a flexible working agreement [...]

The Northern Ireland Court of Appeal recently handed down its decision in the so-called 'gay cake' case, more properly known as Lee v Ashers Baking Company. This was an interesting example of how to treat conflicts between different types of discrimination – in this case discrimination [...]

Gender Pay Reporting regulations are due to come into force on 6 April 2017 and will apply to public and private sector employers with 250 or more employees. At the moment, the government is not concerned with forcing smaller employees to report their data but it [...]