| You may recall that we have previously reported on the new Government’s plan to make the right not be unfairly dismissed applicable from day one of employment. Currently an employee needs two years’ service to be able to claim.
We still do not have the detail, but the new Employment Bill should be published very soon and should, therefore, provide the detail that we really need to prepare for this change. However, the Financial Times reported on 18th September that there will be a 6-month probationary period, suggesting that it may still be quite straight-forward to dismiss someone within the first 6 months. However, as Labour promised to make this a day-one right, it is unlikely that the 6-month probationary period will mean that any dismissal in that period will be considered fair. We don’t know what rules will be placed around the probationary period yet, but it seems likely that some sort of procedure will need to be applied to either prevent an unfair dismissal claim being brought or to be able to successfully defend such a claim. It may well be that any exceptions or defence arguments could be limited only to dismissal connected with the employee’s conduct or performance, and that if it were for some other reason (e.g. redundancy or high absence levels) then a full, fair procedure would need to be followed in the same way as currently applies for longer serving employees.
We will let you know once we have the full details. But if you currently have a probationary period of less than 6 months, you may want to consider changing that for new starters. |
