Final Claims for Statutory Sick Pay Rebate Scheme

Judicial officeholders are commonly high-achieving individuals with wide experience outside the confines of the law. However, as an Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) ruling made plain, they must always be alive to the risk that their extra-judicial activities may give rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias. The case concerned a school pastoral administrator who was sacked after expressing on social media certain views relating to the hotly debated issue of mandatory relationship education in…

Establishing that an employee has made a protected disclosure is the first step on the path to success in any whistleblowing claim. However, as a case concerning a dismissed care homes manager showed, it is often much harder to prove that detrimental treatment is motivated by such a disclosure. The woman had been in post for only about six months when she was dismissed at the end of her probationary period. Her employer asserted that she was dismissed on grounds of capability or performance.…

Judges do not operate in a vacuum and are entitled to take the view that some facts are so obvious that there is no requirement to prove them. In an important ruling, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) found that that principle applies to the fact that women are more likely to bear childcare responsibilities than men. The case involved a community nurse who was primary carer for her three children, two of them disabled. Due to her responsibilities as a mother, she worked only on Wednesdays…