Employment Law for Employers

Whether you need help with a specific employment issue or ongoing support for your business, Wolferstans have the answer. We work with employers across a range of sectors in Plymouth, across the South West and nationwide.

Our employment lawyers can assist employers with matters including:

• Employment contracts & policies
• Disciplinary procedures
• Grievance procedures
• Data protection
• Performance management
• Absence management
• Redundancy
• TUPE
• Dismissals
• Restrictive covenants
• Employment disputes
• Settlement agreements
• Acas early conciliation
• Employment tribunal claims

As an employer, when you use Wolferstans’ employment law services, you can expect:

• A no obligation call to assess your situation and determine whether we can help
• A range of pricing options to include fixed fees
• Specialist advice

Book your initial consultation with our employment lawyers in Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall

Our employment law expertise

At Wolferstans, we appreciate how sensitive employment law matters can be, with the potential for serious consequences if the wrong approach is taken. We also understand the personal and commercial reputations which are at stake. You can trust our employment solicitors to represent your organisation as you would like to see it portrayed.

We know that the cost of legal advice can be a worry. Getting hours and hours of professional advice can be an expensive business. That’s why we have put so much effort into charging fixed fees for our legal services for employers. Plus, we do so at a surprisingly affordable price. For more information about our costs, please visit our Pursuing or Defending Employment Tribunal Claims page.

For ongoing legal help, you might wish to consider our Employment Support Package. This comprehensive package will grant your business access to our team of specialist employment lawyers for an affordable fixed monthly fee. It can also be combined with our HR Cover. This service includes insurance cover to protect against any compensation and legal costs connected with employment tribunal claims. This gives you complete confidence that your budget for employment advice and against the risk of claims is covered. Please see below for details of our Employment Support Package and HR Cover Package.

Whether you choose one of our packages, or just contact us when the need arises, you can expect the same expertise and professional service. Our team offers you a complete one-stop service for all your employment law needs.

How we can help you with employment law for employees

Employment support package

Signing up to our Employment Support Package will grant your business access to our team of highly specialised lawyers who will be available for immediate telephone advice and face to face consultations as and when required.

The Package will provide peace of mind in that you will know personnel matters are in safe hands.

We are firm believers in personal relationships and getting to know our clients. Your business will be allocated an individual solicitor who will visit your premises, gain an understanding of your organisation, its ethos, your attitude and tailor the advice accordingly. This will ensure the advice is consistent and in tune with your values. The advice we offer is pragmatic. We put ourselves in your shoes and offer advice that is the best for the business as a whole, not just to comply with legal obligations.

We want to build a long standing relationship with your business and, in these circumstances, it will only be on very rare occasions that a particular issue falls outside of the scope of the Package. The only areas specifically excluded from the Package are:

• Employment Tribunal claims
• Redundancy Exercises involving 20 or more employees
• Significant TUPE advice

The Package includes unlimited access (telephone, e-mail and meetings in person) during working hours to our specialist employment lawyers. Our Employment Team has years of experience of advising a range of local businesses from sole traders and small partnerships to the largest employers in Plymouth including the University.

We are familiar with dealing with the types of issue that you are likely to face, including handling long term absence, underperforming staff, complaints and grievances and requests for flexible working. The Team are on hand to support you from the time the issue arises until it is concluded for a fixed monthly fee.

HR Cover

You may prefer to combine our Package with a policy of insurance that will cover the cost of going to Employment Tribunals and any award. Our HR Cover service provides your organisation with a fixed-price comprehensive employment advice service giving you complete confidence that your budget for employment advice and the risk of claims is covered.

Dealing with individual employment matters

We can provide tailored legal guidance for any employment law issues your organisation needs to deal with, including:

• Bullying and harassment
• Discrimination
• Families & Pregnancy
• Redundancy
• Flexible working
• Confidential Information and Restrictive Covenants

Employment dispute resolution

Settlement agreements:

Many employment disputes can be avoided or quickly resolved using a settlement agreement. This is a written agreement in which an employee will agree not to bring an employment tribunal claim for a specific matter, usually in exchange for a one-off payment.

Settlement agreements can be a fast, cost-effective way of dealing with employment disputes. They can save you time and money, as well as allowing you to avoid the stress and potential for negative publicity associated with a tribunal hearing.

Our employment lawyers in Plymouth can assist with negotiating and drafting settlement agreements, protecting your business while helping you achieve an early resolution to a potential claim. We can also advise to employees on settlement agreements, which is a legal requirement for the agreement to be valid.

Acas early conciliation:

Before an employee can take an employment dispute to a tribunal, they will normally need to refer the matter to Acas (the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) for early conciliation.

If an employee or former employee refers a matter to Acas for early conciliation, Acas will contact you to give your side of the story. An Acas conciliator will then liaise with both parties to find a voluntary solution to the dispute where possible.

Should you be able to reach an agreement, this will be recorded in a COT3 settlement form. Once you have agreed through early conciliation, it will be binding on both parties.

If you are unable to reach an agreement through early conciliation, the employee may then potentially refer the matter to an employment tribunal to deal with.

Employment tribunals:

Where an employment dispute cannot be resolved amicably, it may be necessary to defend yourself and your business at an employment tribunal. This will involve attending a hearing, which will typically last 1-5 days, at which you or your representative will need to present your case.

Having the right legal representation can make all the difference to the outcome at an employment tribunal hearing as you will need to make sure all the correct evidence is gathered, that your case is built effectively, and that it is presented effectively to the tribunal panel.

If you are involved in one, the case will usually be decided in the tribunal nearest the workplace. The main one locally is in Exeter but occasionally hearings are held in Plymouth, Taunton, Truro or Liskeard.

The panel consists of three people. The chair of the panel is a solicitor or barrister of at least five years’ standing. This is the Employment Judge. As well as the Judge, there are two lay members. One of them has a background from the employer / personnel side of industry, and one of them has a background from the employee / trade union side of industry. They are all, of course, required to be neutral, but this arrangement helps to ensure balance.

An employment tribunal is like a court, but it is a little less formal. Everyone sits down at tables, with some rows of chairs at the back. The tribunal panel sits on a slightly raised platform and there are no wigs and gowns. An employment tribunal has some formal procedures. Witnesses must take the oath or promise to tell the truth. There are formal rules about the order of events and who can speak.

The original intention was that employment tribunals – or industrial tribunals as they then were – would be informal hearings, at which a disgruntled employee could have his complaint heard without fuss or formality, and certainly without lawyers. For that reason, legal costs could only be recovered in the rarest of cases, and this is still true today.

But with every passing year the amount of employment legislation has grown, and now it is very difficult for an individual to present his or her case at a hearing, particularly when it comes to cross-examining their former boss. The widespread use of lawyers at employment tribunals reflects this degree of complexity, and shows that it is generally cost-effective for both parties to get legal help.

Redundancy

Few firms have been unaffected by redundancies in the last few years. For managers trained when the emphasis was all on retaining and motivating people, this has been a massive culture shock.

Where a whole business or department is closing down, it may be obvious where the axe has to fall, but often it is a case of selecting a number of staff from a group. This has to be done as carefully and scientifically as possible to avoid a finding of unfair dismissal. As a minimum, we recommend that the process will last a couple of weeks which is a testing period for managers and staff alike.

First the bad news has to be broken to those who are at risk and the selection process explained. Individual consultation meetings follow, to consider any suggestions for avoiding redundancies, such as going part-time, job-sharing or taking pay cuts. If this does not do the trick – and it rarely does – then a selection exercise has to be carried out, scoring those involved against the criteria that seem most important to the employer. Those provisionally selected will then need the chance to see and comment on their scores at a further meeting, and of course a right of appeal. Where more than 20 staff may be dismissed, more extensive group consultation rules apply.

It may well be sensible to take face to face advice on the appropriate procedure for your situation. This is one of the most difficult and demanding HR procedures to carry out correctly, with severe penalties if it is mishandled.

Bullying and Harassment

Whether you are an employer facing a grievance or an employee finding your working life intolerable, bullying can be a major headache.

When we come to work most of us just want to do a good job. The more conscientious we are, the more sensitive we are to criticism. Many allegations of bullying seem quite minor in themselves – not being included, being overloaded, being criticised unfairly, and so forth – but all these things build up to become demoralising, then upsetting, and then finally it all becomes too much and can lead to being off sick with stress.

Once this situation has developed it is often very difficult to change, and all too often it ends with a resignation and a claim for constructive dismissal, or the employee is dismissed because of the long-term absence from work. From the employer’s point of view, all this is unhealthy, time-consuming and bad for business.

The first step for an employee is to raise a grievance, which is normally done by writing a letter to HR or the appropriate manager. This can be a daunting step in itself. If it does not make things any better, the employee may feel they have no alternative to resigning. If the bullying has been serious, and the employee resigned promptly in response, they could have a claim for constructive dismissal.

There is also useful free guidance available from ACAS in their guide for employees on bullying and harassment and their guide for managers and employers for stress related absence, additional help is available from ACAS, and the HSE, who have a guide to stress.

Discrimination

At its heart, discrimination law is about making sure that employees are treated fairly.

Blatant forms of discrimination are largely a thing of the past, and so claims of discrimination are now almost always about subconscious attitudes, or the unintended effect of particular working practices.

An obvious example is a claim for sexual harassment. This does not have to involve allegations of stalking or overtly sexist remarks – it could be a much more ordinary situation, like a mother returning from maternity leave part-time and being overloaded with work because her manager is not really happy with the arrangement.

Or it may be that a company prefers to recruit young women for its sales team, rather than a middle-aged man, and so is guilty of discrimination on grounds of age and sex. Examples of claims for discrimination are endless.

Many of us, whether we like it or not, tend to recruit in our own image; we tend to think that the ideal person to work in my team is someone just like me – and that brings with it assumptions about age, sex, race, sexual orientation and so on. In an extreme case it can show itself in a preference for someone who went to the same school.

Discrimination law is a large field, which has been ploughed many times over the last ten years. For general guidance, ACAS produce this useful guide and there is a good deal of advice on the BIS website on how to prevent discrimination.

Flexible working

Flexible working has proved to be enormously popular; not just with new mothers returning from maternity leave but with young parents generally.

In an age where often both parents work, maintaining a work/life balance has become a major concern.

From the employee’s point of view, a four-day week or mornings-only routine has much to recommend it. For employers on the other hand, it is a mixed bag. On the plus side, it is very good for retention. Staff with a really suitable arrangement like this are unlikely to be moving elsewhere. But on the down-side, the rent has to be paid five days a week, not just mornings; and the heating and lighting will be on, machinery running, desks and computers sitting idle, while the employee is at home. It all seems rather inefficient.

The Flexible Working Regulations set out a procedure for resolving these tensions. The main elements are that the employee sets out a written request for reduced hours – most employers have a standard form, and the employee should include details of how the new system would work in practice from the business’s point of view – a meeting is held, the proposal is either accepted or rejected, and there is a right of appeal. If the request is refused, the employer has to do so on one or more of eight statutory grounds, which include the burden of additional costs, or the impact on quality or performance.

A refusal can be risky, especially for a mother returning to work after maternity leave. If the company insists on the old full-time hours, this may be met with a resignation, and if the company cannot justify its refusal, it will amount to sex discrimination and unfair dismissal.

All too often however, requests for flexible working are very inflexible requests for particular reduced hours, and a company can justify its stance by offering some flexibility. It may, for example not be practical to have someone go home at 2.30 pm if that would leave no one on reception. It may be difficult to recruit someone for the rest of the day. But the company could consider a job-share arrangement, mornings and afternoons, or perhaps a three-day week instead.

Following the procedure is straightforward, and there is plenty of useful guidance available, e.g. The BIS: Guide to flexible working and work-life balance.

The negotiations however call for some give and take on both sides, and you may need help deciding where to draw the line; i.e. what might be justifiable in an employment tribunal.

Families & Pregnancy

Maternity leave and pay

A number of family-friendly initiatives were introduced by the Labour government from the late 1990s onwards, and which are now well-established – rights to paternity leave, parental leave (for mothers and fathers), emergency dependents’ leave and adoption leave, together with regular increases to maternity leave and pay.

In this area, there is plenty of government guidance setting out the most recent rules and rates of pay in each area. It is worth bearing in mind though that the right to leave and the right to pay in each case are quite separate. Maternity is an obvious example. The right to maternity leave and the right to maternity pay are in different pieces of legislation, so although maternity leave divides into six months “ordinary maternity leave” and six months “additional maternity leave,” the right to statutory maternity pay runs out after 39 weeks (9 months).

The latest figures and rules on entitlement can be found here – Direct.Gov guidance on work and families.

There are also a number of other issues to be aware of with pregnant staff, such as the need to carry out a risk assessment, for which further guidance read the HSE guidance for new and expectant mothers.

But if you have a particular situation to deal with, there is really no substitute for face to face advice. To find out more about how we can help, or to discuss our open and competitive fee structure, call us to see how we can help.

Our employment law advice for employers pricing

Fixed fee employment law advice

Some of our services can be offered on a fixed fee basis, meaning you will know exactly how much it will cost in advance to deal with a specific matter.

Hourly rates for employment law services

For some more complex matters and ongoing employment law advice, we will typically charge according to an hourly rate dependent on the level of expertise required to deal effectively with your matter.

Employment tribunal representation pricing

We regularly represent employers facing employment tribunal proceedings. The costs involved will depend on the length of the hearing and the level of expertise required.

Find out more about our employment pricing.