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The Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Act 2018 was given royal assent on 13 September 2018, having started out in July 2017 as a Private Member’s Bill subsequently supported by the government.

The Act will offer, as a day one right, two weeks’ leave to any employed parents who lose a child under the age of 18 or who suffer a stillbirth after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Employees will also be eligible for statutory bereavement pay if they meet certain criteria, including that they have been employed for at least 26 weeks, ending in the week of the child’s death, and have given the correct notice.

Bereavement leave must be taken within 56 days of the child’s death and parents who have lost more than one child will be entitled to take leave in respect of each child.

The Act provides that regulations will be made in due course, setting out how parental bereavement leave and pay will be taken, and the eligibility criteria. This will include details of notice requirements, whether leave can be taken in separate blocks and whether employees who are not the biological parent of a child (but who have been significantly involved in caring for the child, such as step-parents) will also qualify for leave and pay.

The rights provided by the Act are expected to come into force in April 2020, but this will be confirmed by the regulations.

Under current legislation, employees have the right to take a reasonable amount of unpaid time off work to make arrangements following the death of a dependant. However, the cases on this limit the amount of time off to one or two days at most, save in exceptional circumstances. The change in law is therefore the first time in the UK that specific bereavement leave has been made both a legal right for up to two weeks and paid.

Employers may already have in place a policy on bereavement. Acas has published a  guide to managing bereavement in the workplace, which is available at http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=4977

After the regulations have been published, employers should consider reviewing any existing policy or putting one in place, and should ensure that managers and HR are trained on the new rules.

Born out of frustration after years of women in the city earning less than their male counterparts, the UK’s gender pay gap reporting regime has provided a sense of optimism amongst executives. Companies have been seriously concerned with the impact on their reputation. With the transparency of published figures, companies risk facing public backlash. With that in mind, many of the larger banks are beginning to pilot new schemes ranging from encouraging women to take on roles that are more male-dominated to attempting to remove gender bias from the recruitment system by anonymised certain information. Several other companies are aiming to pilot similar schemes focusing at the mid-career level for women and if those schemes prove successful to implement them on a larger scale.

An employee on a temporary zero hours contract should be classed as an agency worker, the Employment Appeal Tribunal found in Brooknight Guarding Limited v. Matei.

Background

Brooknight Guarding Limited employed Mr Matei as a security guard on a zero hours contract for 21 months. He worked mostly for Mitie Security Ltd, although not exclusively, and Brooknight could assign him to different clients. Mr Matei claimed he should be classed as an agency worker under the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 (Regulation 3(1)). As a result, he said he should be entitled to the same basic working conditions as Mitie staff after 12 weeks of service. The ET found Brooknight was using Mr Matei as a ‘cover security guard’, rather than an employee on a permanent basis, and so the ET classed him as an agency worker. Brooknight appealed the decision to the EAT on the basis that the employee could work on a zero hours contract and still be a permanent employee of Mitie.

Decision

The EAT agreed with the Tribunal’s decision and dismissed Brooknight’s appeal. The Tribunal had considered the nature of Mr Matei’s contract and short period of employment, but these factors were not the determining factors; the focus was on the nature of the work and whether it was temporary. Brooknight’s own correspondence with Mr Matei itself suggested the relationship was temporary. The Tribunal was therefore right to conclude that Mr Matei was an agency worker and entitled to the same terms and conditions as those working directly for Mitie.

Conclusion

The decision informs us that the key issue a tribunal will consider when determining agency worker status is the nature of the work carried out and whether the work is permanent or temporary. The EAT considered the nature of Mr Matei’s contract and relatively short period of employment, but they were not determinative. Employment businesses will need to be mindful that an agency worker on a zero hours contract can still gain rights under the 2010 Regulations after 12 weeks’ service, if the nature of the work is temporary. End users will also have to take note, since they can be held liable for any breach of week 12 rights under the Agency Workers Regulations.