Employment Practice

Key points The Redundancy Payments Act 1965 (whose provisions have long since been repealed and largely re-enacted in the Employment Rights Act 1996) came into force on 6 December 1965. The two principal objectives of the Act were to require employers to compensate redundant employees for the loss of their livelihoods and to establish a Redundancy Fund from which employers would recoup a percentage (or rebate) of any statutory redundancy payment due and paid to a redundant employee. However, the already (by then) much-mutilated redundancy rebates scheme was abolished when the Employment Act 1989 came into force on 16 January 1990. It should be noted that the purpose of the redundancy payments scheme is to compensate a redundant employee for the loss of his (or her) investment in his job – not, as might be supposed, to provide him with sufficient funds to help him survive a period of unemployment. Accordingly, any employee who has lost his job because of redundancy may legit...

Maternity Rights ( The rights of employees before and after childbirth ) Key points Overview Legislation governing the rights of employees before and after childbirth is currently to be found in Part VIII of the Employment Rights Act 1996, as substituted by section 7 and Schedule 4 (Part 1) of the Employment Relations Act 1999 and 'fleshed out' by the Maternity & Parental Leave etc Regulations 1999, which latter were amended (on 24 November 2002) by the Maternity & Parental Leave (Amendment) Regulations 2002. The law regulating an employee's entitlement or otherwise to statutory maternity pay (SMP) or the state maternity allowance (MA) is to be found in Parts II and XII of the Social Security Contributions & Benefits Act 1992 (referred to in this section as 'the 1992 Act'), and in Regulations made under (or saved by) that Act. The 1992 and 1996 Acts apply to persons employed in England, Scotland and Wales. Cognate legislation covers persons employed in N...