Employment e-Brief – Amendments to the TUPE Regulations

At a time when seasonal affective disorder (‘SAD’) has kicked in and many people are miserable having to wait a year until next Christmas and New Year we thought we would bring some joy back into your lives by highlighting that the TUPE Regulations are being amended this month (31 January 2014).

Hopefully, the changes might make the start of the year just a little bit more exciting!

The government had previously consulted on amending the rules and announced the planned changes. The resulting amending regulations have now been released this week and (as expected) the changes include:

• For transfers on or after 31 January 2014 the legislation is amended such that for there to be a ‘service provision change’ the activities carried on after the change in service provision must be “fundamentally or essentially the same” as those carried on before it. i.e. not necessarily identical.
• For transfers on or after 1 May 2014 employee liability information will have to be provided 28 days before the transfer (for transfers until then the current 14 days remains).
• Transferees will be able to change terms derived from collective agreements one year after the transfer provided that the overall change is no less favourable to the employee.
• The legislation is amended to expressly include a change in the location of the workforce following a transfer as falling within the scope of an economic, technical or organisational reason entailing changes in the workforce (ETO reason), thereby preventing genuine place of work redundancies from being automatically unfair.
• On condition that the transferor agrees, a transferee will be able to consult pre-transfer about potential dismissals and that consultation will count for the purpose of the TULRA 1992 collective redundancy rules.
• Micro businesses (those with employees of 10 or less) will be allowed to inform and consult affected employees directly when there is no recognised independent union or existing appropriate representatives.

Please contact a member of our employment team if you would like to discuss or you would like a copy of the amending regulations.