Employment Law Set of the Year
Chambers & Partners and Legal 500

Please join us at our annual Employment Law Conference on 8th May 2017 in London or 7th June 2017 in Leeds.

Specialist barristers from 11KBW – the leading chambers for all aspects of Employment Law – will provide updates and insights on key areas of the law including whistleblowing, modern slavery and equal pay and benefits.  The day starts with three sessions focussing on areas of particular interest to commercial employment practitioners, and ends with a panel discussion on the sensitive and topical issue of  religious discrimination and religious neutrality.

This year we are delighted to have Sir Patrick Elias, recently retired Lord Justice of Appeal and founding member of 11KBW, deliver our keynote address in London. Read more »

In Kellogg Brown & Root (UK) Ltd v Fitton, 0206/16, the EAT revisits the interface between redundancy situations and mobility clauses.  Two principles are reaffirmed and applied.  The first, confirmed by the Court of Appeal in Home Office v Evans   ICR 302, is that an employer is lawfully entitled to invoke an express contractual mobility clause; and avoid liability for a statutory redundancy payment, notwithstanding that a redundancy situation has arisen or might arise on the closure of part of a business.  The second is that if an employee refuses to relocate and the employer dismisses the employee the employer can rely on that refusal to obey a lawful instruction as misconduct, but the ET must then go on to consider the question of fairness, ie whether the employer has acted reasonably in giving the instruction and whether the employee had acted reasonably in refusing to comply with that instruction.

We are delighted to have won Employment Law Set of the Year at last night’s Chambers Bar Awards. Earlier this week we were also awarded Employment Law Set of the Year at the Legal 500 UK Awards 2017.

We are delighted to announce that Chambers has received 3 nominations in this year’s Chambers and Partners Bar Awards; Anya Proops QC has been nominated for Defamation Silk of the Year; Jane McCafferty for Employment Law Junior of the Year; and Chambers for Employment Law Set of the Year.

The awards take place at The London Hilton on Park Lane on Thursday, 27th October 2016. A full list of nominations can be viewed here.

A v B Local Authority and C Governing Body of School [2016] EWCA Civ 766 is concerned with whether an ET had been entitled to find that a Head Teacher of a primary school had been fairly summarily dismissed for gross misconduct, i.e. putting the safety of children at risk, for failing to disclose to the school authorities her close personal relationship with a male (IS) convicted of making indecent images of children by downloading them onto his computer. The ET’s finding was upheld by the EAT (Wilkie J presiding) and has now been upheld by a majority in the Court of Appeal (Black and Floyd LJJ).  Elias LJ dissented.

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In McBride v Scottish Police Authority [2016] UKSC 27 the Supreme Court has considered the remedy for unfair dismissal of reinstatement, which must of course be contrasted with the remedy of re-engagement.  An ET has no power to order reinstatement in terms which alter the contractual terms of the complainant’s employment.  The question was whether that is what the ET had purported to do in this case.  The Supreme Court held that it had not.

The appeal arose from the scandal over the disputed identification of a fingerprint in a murder inquiry. A fingerprint at the murder scene was identified by four experts from the Scottish Criminal Records Office fingerprint bureau as belonging to DC McKie. As a result of the identification, DC McKie was charged with perjury for giving evidence that she had never been to the crime scene. During DC McKie’s trial differences of opinion emerged about the fingerprint identification and she was acquitted.

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Employment lawyers have tended to see data protection as an employee weapon; in particular the strategic fishing expedition subject access request as a precursor to High Court or Tribunal claims. But there is at least one angle from which the DPA can be used as a weapon of attack by employers against former employees. Where an employee leaves their employer and takes a client list with him, not only will he be in breach of the usual restrictive covenants he is likely to have, but he may also have committed a criminal offence under section 55 DPA. Read more »