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13 September 2018 / Ian Smith
Issue: 7808 / Categories: Features , TUPE , Employment
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Employment law brief: 13 September 2018

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Testing, testing, one two three: Ian Smith rounds up a trio of cases which could echo through the courts in the coming years

  • When is an agency-supplied worker in fact ‘permanent’?
  • The right to be accompanied & the law of unfair dismissal
  • What is an ‘administrative transfer’ in TUPE law?

Three very specific points of interpretation arose in the cases in this month’s brief:

  1. When is someone apparently an ‘agency worker’ deprived of that status (and hence its statutory protection) because they are considered ‘permanent’?
  2. What is the relationship between the specific statutory right to be accompanied at a disciplinary hearing on the one hand and the general law of unfair dismissal (especially the requirement of a fair procedure) on the other?
  3. When is a TUPE transfer negated because the transaction in question came under the exception for an ‘administrative transfer’?

These are all relatively small points in the greater scheme of things, but what they have in common is that they could all be legally determinative in cases (admittedly

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