No to sacking slackers

Employment lawyers have given short shrift to leaked proposals to scrap unfair dismissal laws.

A report by venture capitalist Adrian Beecroft for Downing Street, leaked to the press last week, proposes replacing unfair dismissal with “compensated no fault dismissal”. Employers would be allowed to sack staff with basic redundancy pay and notice. Beecroft concedes that employers could sack staff because they don’t like them, but this is “a price worth paying”.

However, lawyers warn that this could create a rise in discrimination claims, which have no limit on the amount of compensation claimed.

Bronwyn McKenna, chair of the Employment Lawyers Association (ELA) legislative and policy committee, says: “If the proposals outlined in Beecroft’s leaked report on unfair dismissal were to be adopted, that would arguably lead to a two-tier system of protection in the workplace, ie legal safeguards will apply to employees with a protected characteristic under the Equality Act and not to those who aren’t so covered.”

On whether the UK could lawfully introduce such a proposal, McKenna said unfair dismissal is “a creation of English statute”, therefore there “may not be an insuperable EU hurdle. There may be questions about the UK’s compliance under its international law obligations”.

Linda Farrell, employment partner at Bristows, says: “Until we see more flesh on the proposal, it is difficult to see how it could work. If an employer says to an employee that they are ‘not up to scratch and should think of hanging up their boots’ it would drive a coach and horses through our age discrimination laws if such a comment could never be raised in an employment tribunal.”