header-logo header-logo

Contracting-out

12 January 2012 / Roderick Ramage
Issue: 7496 / Categories: Features , Procedure & practice , Employment
printer mail-detail

Roderick Ramage provides a rough guide to TUPE, pensions & contracting-out

Some employees’ pension protection rights, even though linked to TUPE, are not subject to restriction on contracting out.

Changing contract terms

Unless the contract expressly provides for it, no party can alter it unilaterally, but the parties can alter it consensually. Alterations of contracts are themselves made by contract. Employment contracts are no different from other contracts, but, because of the respective bargaining strengths of the parties, employers, if they stay successfully on the right side of the boundary between business justification and unfair dismissal, can vary employment contracts unilaterally by a process of an offer of new terms, consultation, warning, and eventually dismissal, coupled with an offer of reengagement on new terms: technically, if this process runs its course, what starts as a proposal to vary the contract ends as a rescission and new contract.

The contracting-out restriction

Normal contract rules do not apply to statutory employment protection rights. Employers and employees may not contract out of the latter’s statutory employment

If you are not a subscriber, subscribe now to read this content
If you are already a subscriber sign in
...or Register for two weeks' free access to subscriber content

MOVERS & SHAKERS

DWF—19 appointments

DWF—19 appointments

Belfast team bolstered by three senior hires and 16 further appointments

Cadwalader—Andro Atlaga

Cadwalader—Andro Atlaga

Firm strengthens leveraged finance team with London partner hire

Knights—Ella Dodgson & Rebecca Laffan

Knights—Ella Dodgson & Rebecca Laffan

Double hire marks launch of family team in Leeds

NEWS
In this week's NLJ, Steven Ball of Red Lion Chambers unpacks how advances in forensic science finally unmasked Ryland Headley, jailed in 2025 for the 1967 rape and murder of 75-year-old Louisa Dunne. Preserved swabs and palm prints lay dormant for decades until DNA-17 profiling produced a billion-to-one match
Charlie Mercer and Astrid Gillam of Stewarts crunch the numbers on civil fraud claims in the English courts, in this week's NLJ. New data shows civil fraud claims rising steadily since 2014, with the King’s Bench Division overtaking the Commercial Court as the forum of choice for lower-value disputes
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
back-to-top-scroll