April legislative timetable – employment law

April legislative timetable – employment law

The coalition government has set out to encourage private sector employment through relaxing employment legislation. From 6^th April 2012 the first batch of these measures are expected.

These include the extension of the service period required for an employee to bring a claim 1 to 2 years for new employees joining after 6^th April, some reforms to the employment tribunal system and changes to limits for cost awards and deposit orders (click here for our earlier news story on these).

Other changes in the pipeline will not be subject to the 6^th April launch but will take place when parliamentary time allows, these include additional mechanisms for early conciliation in employment disputes, financial penalties for employers found to have behaved unreasonably by employment tribunals and a new formula for uprating tribunal awards and calculating redundancy payments.

Unpaid parental leave (a European regulation) is to be extended from 13 weeks per parent per child (18 if the child is disabled) to 18 weeks per parent for all children under 5. The changes to parental leave (a rarely used facility) will not take effect until 2013.

Later still (from 2015) we will expect to see an extension of the right to request flexible working to all parents and further legislation to enable parental leave to be shared between parents.

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