Anna Fletcher provides a round up on holiday entitlement and pay including where we are on overtime, the new pay reference period and calculating holiday pay, part year workers and how to manage holiday during and after the pandemic.

Topics covered in series of four webinars:-

  • A round up on holiday entitlement and pay
  • Confidentiality obligations for employees and ex-employees
  • Managing tricky ER cases in a COVID-19 context, whistleblowing and health and safety issues
  • Overview of what is a redundancy and who is redundant post Covid-19

Transcript

Jane Fielding: Good morning everyone. I am Jane Fielding and I am Head of the Employment, Labour and Equalities team here at Gowling in the UK. I am delighted that you are able to join us for what is the first in a series of four webinars on employment law that we are putting on this year. Perhaps for obvious reasons we cannot host you in our offices as we normally would in June to bring you up to date with what is happening at the mid-year point. Hopefully by January when we look ahead to what is going on in 2021 we will be back in the offices and be able to have everybody in or as many people as can make it and we are very much looking forward to that.

But for now these webinars are going to cover four topics, and today our topic is holiday entitlement and holiday pay which, in the UK, is surprisingly complicated perhaps and those of you who have to grapple with this in HR or legal, perhaps sometimes you feel like you need a holiday once you have managed to sort all of this out!

What we are going to cover today then is a refresher on where this entitlement comes from. Then we are obviously going to touch, given the current situation with the Coronavirus pandemic, on managing holiday while we are all dealing with that, and then we are going to cover the case law that has been generated over the last few years about overtime and how you calculate that and what should be taken into account when you are working out holiday pay. So I am going to bring you up to speed with the case law in that area. Then finally, we are going to cover the curious case of part-year workers - that is not a typo for part time workers, it is part-year workers and that concept has been introduced by a case which we are going to talk about and bring you up to speed on in this webinar.

So I am just going to introduce my fellow speaker and then I will do a few housekeeping points before I hand over and Anna. Hi Anna.

Anna Fletcher: Hi Jane.

Jane: So Anna is going to talk you through all of that. Before I hand over to her I just wanted to give you a couple of housekeeping points, obviously less than if we were in person I do not need to do the fire alarm evacuation, etc. During the webinar you will see at the bottom of your screen you have a Q&A function. If you want to ask any questions, and we really would welcome those, please do use that function and type your questions in. While Anna is speaking I will be monitoring those and we have factored in some time at the end of the session to answer as many of those questions as we can. Judging by previous experience I do not think we will get to all of them, but we will do our best to pick up as many as we can. You will also be prompted at the end of the webinar to provide some feedback to us. We would be very grateful if you would do that, it only takes a couple of minutes, but we do read that and take it into account in shaping future sessions. So if you do have time, please do fill that in and send it back to us. So I will now hand over to you Anna.

Anna: Thank you Jane. Morning everybody.

So if I start from the beginning, refresher on the Working Time Regulations 1998. I will just touch on those briefly. Regulation 13 Leave - that is our four week European leave which derives from the Working Time Regulations and Working Time Directive. Regulation 13A Leave - that is the 1.6 week's leave that derives from domestic legislation contained in Regulation 13A. Notionally it is to do with the bank holidays but we do not have a statutory right to bank holidays. Then, of course, there is the contract of employment. So in terms of managing holiday during the pandemic there are essentially three areas what I wanted to cover.

So the first is in relation to holiday for employees, then there is accrual and carry over and then there is the impact of quarantine arrangements so looking at the next slide this is the slide that deals with how you are going to deal with holiday entitlement during the pandemic so these are unusual times, unprecedented times. I don't support anybody probably the new the word furlough before March but we now have this situation where we have the Coronavirus Job Retention scheme, employees being furloughed where there is no work for those employees and obviously there is an impact then in relation to holiday entitlement. So there are three publications that are relevant here.

The first relates to the ACAS guidance which was published on 31 March. The ACAS guidance has been updated since so it covers lots of issues, it covers things like self-isolation and returning people to work. There is also the issue in relation to how you address and deal with your employees that is covered off in that guidance as well. HMRC's guidance, the first guidance that was actually published in relation to holiday entitlement came out on 17 April but it was the fourth version of the guidance so no wonder everybody was sort of scratching their heads up until that point about what actually furlough and pandemic meant to holiday entitlement and holiday pay and so on. And then we have Baize guidance introduced on 13 May now all of those publications have a degree of commonality so I thought what I would do is draw together what they mean in practice.

So we do now know that holiday is not broken by furlough and that was a concern initially. We know that holiday continues to accrue during furlough and we know that there is no kind of interference with employers' rights under regulation 15 in relation to how employers manage holiday. So if you want to request and require your workforce to take holiday the default position is that regulation 15 requires you to essentially serve notice which is twice the period of the leave that you want the individual to take. If you want somebody to take 5 days' leave then the requirement is that you give them 10 days' notice. If on the other hand you want to cancel or refuse a request for holiday then the time limits are slightly different but the counter notice provisions are quite similar, you have to give the same amount of notice as the period of leave that the individual has either asked to take or you are wanting to cancel. So no change to that particular provision in relation to your right as an employer to manage the holiday of your workforce.

So we also know from the various publications that there is a great deal of focus on engaging with the workforce, particularly if you need to explain to the workforce why you are going to require them to take leave because you can understand that for some individuals at the moment lockdown as it is before we start to unlock actually is quite challenging. It is difficult for some individuals particularly those who are self-isolating to see how on earth they can actually enjoy their rest and relaxation. The kind of benefits that you would expect to derive from holiday. So it is interesting because in Baize guidance, Baize guidance says specifically that as an employer you must consider when you are looking at requiring people to take leave the restrictions that might apply to an individual employee to the workforce and that is in relation to things like social distancing and self-isolation to determine if that prevents the employee from resting relaxing or enjoying their leisure time so that is slightly just creates a slight issue which I am going to come back to.

We know that holiday pay has to be paid at 100% in other words normal pay so that means if you have people on furlough and have been paid 80% under the job retention scheme then you are going to need to top up and again for some employers that is going to have a serious impact. And then finally we have the working time Coronavirus Amendment Regulations which I am going to deal with specifically. We are looking at that final bullet point in relation to bank holidays. Not a huge amount of change. Obviously if you have an employee who is furloughed who would ordinarily work on a bank holiday you are quite entitled as an employer to claim under the scheme for that day. If you have somebody who would not normally work on a bank holiday then you can choose to pay them 100% but equally what you might decide to do is to re-designate the day and then give that person a day off in lieu in due course. So no great changes and in fact you have only obviously got one more bank holiday to deal with before the end of the Coronavirus job retention scheme on 31 October.

So if we turn to the next slide looking at managing holiday during the pandemic. As I have said it is really clear that working time holiday so that is your entitlement under regulation 13A will continue to accrue. Now when it comes to the issue of carry over that can be more complicated, because you have to look specifically at the type of leave you are dealing with. So in relation to Regulation 13 leave there has been up until March, as I will explain later, a completely mandatory prohibition on any carryover of the first four weeks of holiday, the holiday that derives from the directive. There are a couple of exceptions. The most common exception I suspect people come across and you will be familiar I am sure with the case of Stringer is where somebody is on long term sick leave and that prevents them from being able to take their leave. So that is fine, that is quite well settled. It does have an impact which I will talk about in relation to how we are dealing with holiday during the pandemic however. And then of course you have got maternity returners who will come back to work with their full holiday entitlement intact and in some cases that can be quite problematic because it is very difficult for them to squeeze in an entire year's worth of leave before the end of the leave year and in those cases they will be permitted to carry over. So far as Regulation 13A leave is concerned the 1.4 weeks then in that situation it is possible for the employer to agree with the employee that leave can be carried over and we see that quite regularly and of course the employer can enter into contractual arrangements around carry over if they wish to.

So having looked at the particular provisions that existed up until 26 March I thought that we would now focus really on the impact of the working time amendment regulations. You can imagine the concern and I am sure many of you have shared this concern amongst employers where you might have all of your workforce furloughed or some of your workforce furloughed with some people working where there is just no slack, no opportunity for people to take holiday because you need them at the coalface. In those situations employers were increasingly concerned that at the end of the furlough scheme when people came back into work then actually people would come back with huge waves of leave entitlement to take which would be really difficult to take before the end of the leave year and with the use it or lose it provisions that apply to Regulation 13 leave individual employees could also be really disadvantaged by the restrictions imposed by our original working time regulations. So as a result of that these amended regulations were introduced as sort of a temporary measure and what they allow for is carry over and what they say is where it is not reasonably practicable as a result of the effects of Coronavirus on the worker and the employer specifically and on society and the economy more broadly then leave can be carried over, and it is not just about carry over into the next leave year it actually allows the leave to be carried over into the next two leave years that immediately follow the leave year in which the holiday should have been taken.

So a huge relief I suspect for some employers although if you look at the various guidance documents that have been published there is clearly a huge focus on ensuring that people or employers are actively engaging with their workforce and trying to encourage people to take leave because we cannot lose sight of the fact that of course even if you are working from home, even if you are in the work place at the moment, even if you cannot go anywhere at least as things stand today you still need a break, you still need to have rest and the whole purpose behind the working time regulations is that they are health and safety driven. So there is an issue about allowing people that time off.

So there are a couple of things I wanted to pick up about the amending regulations. So in terms of those amending regulations you might ask what does reasonably or not reasonably practicable actually mean? Now ACAS when they issued their guidance on 31 March gave three examples of where they thought that it would not be reasonably practicable for holiday to be taken. The first is the most obvious and that is where somebody is working where there is no slack in the workforce and the employer cannot allow anybody to take leave. That is pretty straightforward. The second example they refer to is where people are sick. How if you have got somebody who is on long term sick then the principles of Stringer are going to apply but you may have people who are deemed sick so they are self-isolating or for example they are shielding or in fact they are people who are on furlough who are sick but you leave them on furlough rather than moving them on to SSP. In those situations you may have individuals who actually are not able to take their leave so this may be another situation where leave can be carried over at the end of the leave year. And that has a really interesting addition, the third example that ACAS give is in relation to where people are on furlough and obviously people who are on furlough are not working but just because you are on furlough it does not mean that you cannot enjoy your holiday when your holiday is designated. It may be that it is no different than the previous week because you are just at home not working but ACAS give that as an example and I think it is a bit odd because it is not in keeping with some of the legislation or the legislative developments that have been dealt with in relation to the working time regulations over the years and in particular a Supreme Court decision in a case called Russell and Translation International. The principles from that case are fairly clear. If you are working you are working, and if you are not working you are resting and the working time regulations really do not draw a distinction in any other way so this is not about the quality of your rest this is just about the fact that if you are not working then you are resting and that case involves some oil rig workers who worked two weeks of each month on the rigs and then two weeks off and the employer designated leave in the period when they were not on the rigs and the Supreme Court said that was fine. So I am not sure that that example that is given in the ACAS guidance would necessarily hold good because I think that the fact is that if you are not working necessarily you can be working, the employer can require that period to be a period of leave.

So obviously lots of employers may be concerned about this from a cash flow perspective and not actually want to have people on holiday when they are on furlough because of the requirement to top up to full normal pay so this gives those employers some comfort that actually people can still take their leave because the use it or lose it provisions as far as the Regulation 13 leave are concerned disapplied. Obviously, you may find that employees are disgruntled by this and so we may expect to see some grievances but quite whether there is any case law that is likely to be developed here or any litigation that has got legs it is really quite debatable. However I think what it does do is it demonstrates the importance of ensuring that you keep accurate records of when leave is taken so that if there is a challenge at a later date you will be really well placed to be able to respond and you will have accurate records that can be relied on.

So I just want to move on now to a slide dealing with managing holiday during the pandemic so far as quarantine is concerned and obviously quite a novel concept introduced in June, some fairly prescriptive rules around quarantine so a mandatory 14 week period of self-isolation with extremely limited activity. I know there are some exceptions. There are some exceptions in relation to people in particular roles but also there are some exceptions for those who are coming in from what are called the common travel areas. So if you have got somebody returning from the Republic of Ireland or coming back from the Isle of Man on the Channel Islands they will not be subject to quarantine. Now of course quarantine is not going to be an issue for employees where those employees are able to work from home so I suppose theoretically looking at the media coverage yesterday I could jet out to Benidorm for a fortnight with Jane's approval and then I could come back and I would just quarantine at home and I would just return to work. But if I am somebody who has to work in the workplace then clearly I am not going to be allowed to do that because that is not allowed by the rules. So in those circumstances who do you deal with that situation. So there are a couple of things to think about, could you require the individual if you booked two weeks leave and they are going abroad and they have to go into quarantine for two weeks require them to take a further two weeks of leave. Is that actually compatible with the Baize guidance. Is it reasonably practicable for that person to take their leave given that actually they will be self isolating and those self isolating provisions are very stringent it is not just a case of social distancing for example so may be some challenge there.

You might ask the individual to take unpaid leave that may not be the alternative because they are not able to attend work and deliver the work which they are contractually obliged to do. There is some discussion out there about whether or not you could treat that person as being on sick leave. I think that is highly unlikely and I say that because although the statutory sick pay regulations have been amended to cover people who are self-isolating those people are self-isolating on the basis of medical advice, the NHS advice. Somebody who comes back and has to quarantine and be in self-isolation for a 14 day period is doing that because of the quarantine requirements, not because of the fact that NHS has said that is what we need to do, and as far as I am aware there is no suggestion by the DWP that they are going to change the regulations in relation to statutory sick pay again and then there is the question of course about whether the individual actually went on holiday, that holiday was authorised, because if actually they just cannot come into work then we may be in a situation where absence, if they are no engaging with you, might end up being treated as unauthorised absence.

So that is where we are in relation to the pandemic so lots of things unfolding lots of potential for arguments in due course. I think the key message from the various publications is the importance of communicating with your workforce and ensuring that your workforce understand why it is you are asking them to do what you are asking them to do and as I say encouraging people to take a break, even as I say it means it's a 'homecation' not even a staycation but a 'homecation'. Hopefully tomorrow will bring some, or later today, will bring some happier news in relation to the easing of lockdown so that there is more flexibility for people to get back into what we might describe as some form of normality and be able to take holiday.

I am going to move on now to look at overtime and where we are now. So on the next slide what I want to do, is just again as a refresher, to remind everybody about how the employment tribunals now approach the issue of calculating a week's pay for the purposes of holiday pay so regulations, the Working Time Regulations do not specifically contain a formula. What Regulation 16 does, it directs employers to section 221 to 224 of the Employment Rights Act so when you then start looking at the detail of that legislation and it is quite unwieldy what we are quite clear is that if you have normal working hours and your pay does not vary then your weekly pay is based on your basic salary. If you do have a situation where your pay does vary, with the work that is done or when that work is done, then you have to look at average earnings over a reference period. I will come back to that in a moment. If you have no normal working hours then again it is average earnings over a reference period so the question is what is the reference period? Well case law, well we have tended to see in the case law reference to the 12 week reference period that was contained in the Employment Rights Act but of course that is now a much longer reference period as a result of changes that were introduced on 6 April and those changes were introduced to give effect to the recommendation of the Taylor review and the good work plan. So that 52 week period is effectively what it does it evens out somebody's average earnings because you might have somebody who worked a lot of overtime just ahead of holiday so they get a bit of a windfall if you like when they are paid their week's pay for holiday pay purposes but you might also have a situation where somebody has worked a lot of overtime in recent weeks and therefore their pay is sort of deflated. So the idea is it equalises and creates something a bit more stable. That 52 week reference period you can count back as 104 weeks because you discount any week in which no pay was received but that seems to be unlikely in most circumstances.

So moving on to the next slide what I wanted to do, as Jane mentioned, was really just capture some of the more recent case law so it might look odd that I have got reference there to Fulton Bear Scotland because it was a case that was decided by the Employment Tribunal way back in 2014 but it is relevant and it is relevant for a couple of reasons. The first is that obviously what it did was confirm that if you have non-guaranteed overtime, so that is where you the employer can require the individual to work overtime, they have no entitlement to overtime then that counts towards holiday pay and forms part of normal remuneration. The reason I have included it however is there were two points that were made in the case that are now subject to potential challenge in Bear Scotland the Employment Appeal Tribunal looked at the issue of the order in which you take your holiday so do you take Regulation 13 the first four weeks first followed by Regulation 13A the 1.6 week second and then any contractual entitlement on top of that. Well that is what the Employment Appeal Tribunal and in Bear Scotland decided Regulation 13 goes first.

No so according to the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal in the case of Chief Constable of Northern Ireland against Agnew, which is a much more recent case from last year. There they said actually there is no sort of running order, which actually makes it quite difficult because if you think about the carry over provisions that are going to apply in relation to the pandemic and the amending regulations that were introduced in March. They only apply as far as Regulation 13 leave is concerned so we could get some arguments around what sort of leave you are dealing with and whether there is that right to rely on those amending regulations. The other reason I wanted to touch on Bear Scotland as well is in that case you may remember that the Court was very clear that if there was a break of more than three months between payments then that broke the series of deductions so if you brought your unlawful deduction of wages claim if there was a break of more than three months you could not go any further back, so you could not leapfrog back potentially all the way back to 1 October 1998 now as a result of Bear Scotland there were some further regulations introduced for deduction of wages limitation regulations which were introduced in 2014, they came into effect in January 2015. They limit back pay to a two year period so to some extent that means that some employers have some comfort because at least you know where the long stop date is Agnew on the other hand the Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland said actually that three month period does not break the series of deductions, you can leap frog back.

It is of course important to say that the Court of Appeal in Ireland does not bind the Court here, however it does give some scope for arguments based on Agnew being run here and some potential challenge to the issue of round series of deductions so I thought it was relevant to just touch on that. What Bear Scotland left unanswered was the issue in relation to the whole piece around Willets and Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council. In this particular case this was a case that involved arguments around voluntary overtime involved 56 employees, it was not just overtime it was a variety of other payments that they were paid and the Court basically said if these payments were regular and settled then they should be included in the calculation of holiday pay. Then we have a more recent case of Flowers and the East of England Ambulance Service, here ambulance workers were entitled to two forms of overtime payment. Once was non guaranteed so clearly that counted, one related to voluntary overtime and as a result of the decisions in the Employment Appeal Tribunal Court of Appeal they decided that if payments or voluntary overtime were regular and recurring then they should include it.

So that case, there was leave to appeal given on 12 March so it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court comes to the same conclusion, but it seems to me that the direction of travel is pretty clear, there is an issue however there of course you need to look at each case on its own facts, it may well be that you cannot establish the degree of regularity that is required.

So moving on next to the rise of the part-year worker, and as Jane said, that is not a typo this is a new term that has come into dealing and I am going to explain why but starting with the premise of how you deal with holiday pay for people who are on zero hours contracts and any kind of atypical worker, now if has been long established that a short hand way of calculating entitlement and pay is to apply this 12.07% now that comes from the calculation that is on the slide. Basically a 52 week year reducing by the 5.6 weeks of annual leave down to 46.4 weeks you then divide the 5.6 weeks leave by that 46.4 weeks and get this lovely percentage that allows you to determine entitlement and pay.

So that is great it was in the guidance, everything was fine we all understood that as this sort of golden formula but then we come on to the next slide and we come on the case of Brazel and Papertrust. This is the rise of the part-year worker. So just explain a little bit of detail, entirely relevant actually where the Court got to in its conclusions. So in this particular case Mrs Brazel was a music teacher, she worked for a school, she worked under a zero hours permanent contract, she did not work every week she worked when she was required. Some years she would work 32 weeks in the year and sometimes she would work 35 it just depended on how many weeks there were where the school was in operation and then she would take her holiday during the school holidays so she was basically just working week to week during term time. Her contract provided that she was entitled to 5.6 weeks leave so at the end of every term, what the school did was that they applied the golden formula, they applied the 12.07% and then they paid her her holiday. Mrs Brazel looked at this and said well actually I am entitled to the full 5.6 weeks leave and that is what I should be paid so I have suffered an unlawful deduction of wages. The employer said no it needs to be proportionate to the work done in effect we cannot have a situation where somebody who is part time is being treated better than somebody who is full time.

Now when Mrs Brazel applied the golden formula if you like to her calculations and the way she did this was to say well you know there is 46.4 weeks of working time in the year where those weeks count, in her case if divided that by 32 weeks then multiplied it by 12.07% you get to 17.5% and that is what she said her holiday should have been based on and therefore she said she was being underpaid. The Employment Tribunal looked at this and they said well actually there should be pro rating you do not apply the 12 week average you have to read words in to the working time regulations, so we are going to say that you have to cap pay at 12.07%.

The case was then appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal and they agreed with Mrs Brazel that in fact when you looked at regulation 16 and the provisions and the formula set out in the Employment Rights Act then actually you should use the 12 week reference period and that actually you could treat part time workers more favourably than full time workers because although the part time workers' regulations contain provisions that mean it is unlawful to treat part timers less favourably there isn't a corresponding provision that means that full timers can complain that they are being treated less favourably than part timers.

So the case then went to the Court of Appeal and this is where the term part-year worker was coined and this is somebody who works part of the year but effectively is employed for the whole year so you have got people who are working sporadic weeks on and off throughout the course of the year so it is not like somebody who works part-time all of the year and that is the real distinction.

So in that case the Court of Appeal said you don't need to pro-rata. What they said was basically Mrs Brazel was entitled to 5.6 weeks' leave and it leads to some really odd outcomes and this was something that was argued by the barrister acting for the trust, Caspar Glyn QC, who gave an example of an individual who worked one week in the year. In that situation if that individual worked one week in a year they would be entitled to 5.6 weeks' leave so if you assume that person is paid £1,000 for that one week then they would be entitled to holiday pay of £5,600 which is very odd that the Courts weren't persuaded.

So moving onto the next slide just to bring the session to a close, where are we with the situation following Brazel. Well permanent workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of leave regardless and that formula may not actually now give the correct entitlement and pay for people who are part year workers so it is necessary to carry out specific calculations to work out what they should be paid and the formula itself has now been removed from the Baize guidance and then just as a very final point, I am very relieved there wasn't new guidance on holiday published yesterday but what I can tell you is that Caspar Glyn representing the trust here tweeted yesterday that leave to appeal to the Supreme Court was granted yesterday, so we wait with baited breath to see whether the rise of the part year worker may be followed by the demise of the part-year worker but as I say it leads to some very strange situations and it may well be that this is a bit of an anomaly and the position that existed before the Brazel litigation is restored after the Supreme Court has had an opportunity to look at the issue, but we will keep you updated.

So that is the end of the session, I hope that's been useful and we now have some time for more questions.

Jane: Thanks Anna, so we've had questions coming through, the first one relates to what you said about the new Coronavirus regulations allowing carry over where it is not reasonably practicable to take the holiday, and the question is do employers have to allow employees to carry over leave into the next year when they haven't used the holiday up just because they didn't want to take it in 2020, or can employers in that situation refuse to carry over on the basis it was reasonably practicable for them to take it and they just didn't?

Anna: Well it seems to me that the amending regulations don't really change the existing position so if it was reasonably practicable for the worker, for the employee to take their holiday, then the same normal 'use it or lose it' provisions will apply. But there is one thing I think to be aware of and that is a case that was decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union, or its board at Shimazu and in that case the Court said that actually employers have to be, and the word they used was 'diligent', around drawing to the employee's attention the fact that leave will be lost. If you are in a situation where you can see as the employer, that an individual does have holiday entitlement that hasn't been used and you can consider that actually it is reasonably practicable for them to take it, I would suggest that you ensure that is drawn to the individual's attention and you make a record of that as well.

Jane: OK thank you. And then another question about the bank holidays that you touched on. Can an employer still claim furlough pay from HMRC for bank holidays where the employees are paid in full? I think that's indicating, it says we pay them in full which presumably means they get paid for bank holidays when they work them.

Anna: I think if an individual would have worked the bank holiday then there doesn't seem to be any problem with claiming under the scheme, I think it is where the individual does not ordinarily work a bank holiday. If they are on furlough then the employer will have to top up, they can only claim the 80% under the scheme and if you do not want to do that then you are going to have to re-designate the day and give that person a day in lieu at a later date.

Jane: And then just finally, what if the employee has booked leave before any of the Coronavirus pandemic kicked off and they now want to cancel that leave, what can employers do then?

Anna: OK, the starting point is to say that there is not an obligation on the employer to agree to that, however I think it would be really sensible to actually explore why it is that the individual wants to cancel leave. If they are going to argue that it is because actually they are not going to be able to enjoy their holiday and there is some merit in that argument, then you may agree. The other thing of course is if you have a situation where the individual actually, it turns out that they are actually sick and it may be that you have a furloughed employee who does not tell you that they are sick and they just remained on furlough, then you need to bear in mind the existing case law that says there is an entitlement to rebook. So I think again, as with all of these things, it is about exploring the reasons why the request has been made and then making an informed decision.

Jane: Yes, there is the law and then there is employer relations as well isn't there?

Anna: Indeed.

Jane: OK, well thank you very much everybody for listening. We have come to our 40 minutes so we will draw it to a close. As I said earlier you will get a feedback request so if you could fill that in so we can take it into account that would be excellent. If you can join us on Thursday for our next webinar we will be discussing confidentiality issues but otherwise thank you very much to you Anna for presenting and fielding the questions and thank you to everybody for listening.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Read the original article on GowlingWLG.com

Originally published 29 June, 2020

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.