As I noted in my last post on this topic, it is rare to find a factor in an employment relationship that provides a knock-out point as to the nature of that relationship. However, the exception that proves the rule is tax. There is remarkably little authority on the importance of this point but my experience

It is common in Employment Tribunals for there to be an application to substitute one respondent for another, most frequently because of a mistake, but it is unusual for a tribunal to be asked to substitute the name of a claimant. These are the facts of Enterprise Liverpool v Edwards, a recent decision of the

There was an interesting story in the Daily Mail a few weeks ago in which the government was criticised for making fake applications for several jobs to find out whether candidates from ethnic minorities were being put at a disadvantage. This was done in part because of a proposed amendment to the Equality Bill that CVs should be required to exclude the

I am a big fan of the Industrial Relations Law Reports, which I find is much fresher than the Industrial Case Reports and feel it selects a better choice of cases. I still await the day when one of my cases is reported in it and I was disproportionately excited to discover the inclusion this month of Dumfries and

I did promise to report back on this case when the judgment appeared and I apologise for the fact that it has taken me a week to do so. However, this is partly due to the fact that the only really new and interesting point is obiter. This is not the first case to say that

Employment status can appear to be a very confusing issue. It proliferates authorities containing such exotic terms as ’mutuality of obligations’, the ‘control test’ and the ‘economic reality’ test. Witness statements often contain a vast shopping list of details about the nature of the employment relationship from the layout of the office  to the ownership of the company fax machine. There have been decisive shifts in the

A key role of the House of Lords is preserving consistency in the interpretation of statutes across many different areas of law. While it is sometimes criticised, containing as it does no employment lawyers, for losing sight of industrial reality, it can also provide a refreshingly straightforward approach. Such is the case in SCA Packaging v Boyle, which

The case of Nationwide Building Society v Niblett is another well-reasoned decision by Judge Richardson which will hopefully clear up some confusion about the case of Bournemouth University v Buckland that I have highlighted in a previous post. Firstly, it emphasises that the Fairbrother line of cases, which appear to bring the reasonable range of responses test into