Employment law changes which take effect on 1 October 2006

A number of significant changes in employment legislation are effective from 1st October 2006.

Age Discrimination

The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006 make it unlawful to discriminate against someone on the basis of age unless, where discrimination is either direct or indirect, such discrimination can be objectively justified. Although the pensions’ provisions of these Regulations have now been deferred until 1 December 2006, the rest of the Regulations come into force on 1st October 2006 as planned. Please click here for a link to our Age discrimination Law Now series.

Family Friendly Rights

The Work and Families Act 2006 makes important changes to many family friendly rights. A number of provisions of this Act and related regulations come into force on 1 October 2006 and will apply to women whose expected week of childbirth or date of adoption falls on or after 1 April 2007. The legislation will:

• extend the period of statutory maternity pay (SMP), maternity allowance (MA) and statutory adoption pay (SAP) from 26 weeks to 39 weeks;
• remove the length of service requirement for additional maternity leave (AML) so that all mothers will now be entitled to one year off for maternity leave;
• increase the period of notice that an employee has to give to her employer when returning early from AML or additional adoption leave (AAL) from 28 days to eight weeks;
• allow women or adopters to go into work for up to 10 mutually agreed ‘keeping in touch’ days during their maternity leave, without losing SMP or SAP entitlement for those weeks. The legislation also provides protection from detriment or dismissal for employees who undertake, consider undertaking or refuse to undertake such work;
• clarify employers’ rights to have “reasonable contact” (which will be defined in forthcoming guidance) with employees who are on leave;
• allow women to choose to start their Maternity Pay Period on any day so that maternity leave can be aligned with pay;
• allow employers to split weekly payments of SMP, SPP and SAP over two pay periods if this makes administration easier;
• remove the small employers' exemption so that employers with five or less employees are no longer exempted from a finding of automatic unfair dismissal where they do not allow an employee returning from AML or AAL to return to the same or a similar job.

National Minimum Wage

The national minimum wage will increase to £5.35 for workers aged 22 and over and to £4.45 for workers aged 18-21.

Notification of Collective Redundancies

In Junk v Kühnel (case c-188/03), the ECJ held that employers could not issue notices of dismissal until they had consulted employee representatives and notified the competent public authority. The Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (section 193) has now been amended to provide that an employer proposing collective redundancies must notify the Secretary of State of its proposal before it gives notice to any employee to terminate his employment contract.

Licensing of Gangmasters

The Gangmasters Licensing Authority (GLA) was set up to curb the exploitation of workers in the agriculture, horticulture, shellfish gathering and associated processing and packaging industries.

From 1 October 2006 it will be illegal for a business to provide labour to these regulated sectors if they do not have a gangmasters licence.