In Hall v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police the EAT has overturned an Employment Tribunal decision that an employee was not discriminated against under section 15 of the Equality Act in being dismissed for gross misconduct following disability related sickness. The EAT held that the Tribunal had wrongly focused on the employer’s motive for dismissing the employee and the remoteness of the connection between her disability and the unfavourable treatment.

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The CJEU has given Judgment in a Greek case, the principle of which may have some effects on UK shared parental leave. The case of Maistrellis v Ypourgos Dikaiosynis, Diafaneias kai Anthropinon Dikaiomaton concerned a piece of legislation in Greece which allowed for 9 months parental leave for female civil servants but in contrast, fathers who are civil servants were only entitled to this parental leave if the mother of the child worked in, or exercised, a profession.

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In MBNA Limited v Jones the EAT held that inconsistency of treatment between two employees did not necessarily render the dismissal of one unfair.

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A reference was made to the ECJ regarding the calculation of holiday pay when a part-time worker increased her hours. This was dealt with in the case of Greenfield v The Care Bureau Limited.

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In Hyde Housing Association v Layton the EAT, upholding the employer’s appeal, has held that there was no transfer of the Claimant’s employment on the facts of the case. This concerned an employee changing from being employed by a single employer to a group of employers which included the original employer. Nonetheless the EAT noted that multiple transferors would not prevent TUPE applying – this situation was one in which there were multiple transferees.

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In Science Warehouse Limited v Mills the EAT held that a Claimant did not need to go through the early conciliation process in respect of adding a victimisation claim by way of amending her existing claims of pregnancy/maternity discrimination. Amending the existing proceedings is within the case management powers of the Tribunal’s case management and the Tribunal is not required to refuse to add a claim in respect of which the early conciliation procedure had not been observed.

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In Ebrahimian v France, the European Court of Human Rights has held that a hospital worker whose contract was not renewed after she refused to remove a head scarf which she wore for religious reasons at work, did not have her right to religious freedom under article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights breached. The European Court held that the principle of secularism and the neutrality of public services justified the interference with her right to manifest her religious belief.

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It is well known that the service provision changes under TUPE do not apply to tasks of short term duration. The case of ICTS UK Limited v Mahdi and others considered just this point in the EAT i.e. what constituted a task of short term duration.

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The Department for Business Innovation and Skills brought a case against 3 ex directors of City Link under TULR(C)A for failing to give sufficient notice of redundancies. The case failed. As is well known, where employers plan to dismiss 100 or more staff at one location they must notify the Secretary of State 90 days in advance and a failure to do so may bring a fine of up to £5,000 (at the relevant time – the fine is now unlimited).

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In Stephens v University of Birmingham the High Court has ruled that it was a breach of the implied term of trust and confidence by the employer in refusing the employee the right to be accompanied by a representative of their choice for the purposes of attending an investigatory meeting which could lead to disciplinary action.

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Yet another case has been decided on what constitutes working time for the purposes of the National Minimum Wage where someone is on night duty.

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In Underwood v Wincanton Plc the EAT has considered the circumstances in which a public interest disclosure satisfies the public interest test introduced in 2013 by section 43B of the Employment Rights Act. The purpose of introducing the public interest test was to move away from incidences of employees or workers successfully claiming that breaches of their own employment contract, which was something specific to them, was a breach of a legal obligation and thus passing the protected disclosure test. After the EAT’s recent decision in Chesterton Global Limited and another v Nurmohamed (which is itself being appealed to the Court of Appeal) it appears this test is being ever more swiftly dumbed down.

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