The Employment Appeal Tribunal has confirmed, in Lofty v Hamis (trading as First Café), that a “pre-cancerous” skin lesion is a deemed disability for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. Read more

In Really Easy Car Credit Ltd v Thompson the Employment Appeal Tribunal considered whether an employer, having decided to dismiss an employee, is required to revisit their decision if, prior to communicating the decision, the employer is notified of the employee’s pregnancy. Read more

In Ville de Nivelles v Matzak  the European Court of Justice determined that time spent on stand-by counts as working time under the Working Time Directive when the obligations placed on a worker during that stand-by time significantly restrain that worker’s ability to pursue non-work activities. Read more

The Agency Workers Regulations 2010 entitles an agency worker, after 12 continuous weeks in the role, to the same basic working and employment conditions that they would have had if they had been recruited directly by the hirer. Kocur v Angard Staffing Solutions provides the first Employment Appeal Tribunal decision on the assessment of “the same basic working and employment conditions”, finding that the comparison must be on a term-by-term basis and not a global assessment.

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In the case of Keeping Kids Company v Smith and others, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (“EAT”) looked at whether a charity breached its collective redundancy consultation obligation in the lead-up to its insolvency.  The EAT dismissed an appeal against an Employment Tribunal’s decision that the charity had breached its obligation by failing to commence the collective consultation process “promptly” after submitting a business plan in which it was envisaged that more than half of the staff would be made redundant.

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