Employer Weekly News Edition 19. 23 July - 6 August 2021

Hello and welcome to this weeks edition of the Castle Associates news roundup for employers.  

Today is seventy six years since the detonation of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and we can still feel its heat. In keeping with the heat here’s a guide to managing annual leave this summer.(1) The government has released its consultation report on reducing work place ill health and here’s the main points for employers.(2) Following Matt Hancock’s display of ‘how to get caught red handed having an affair that costs your political career’ we take a look at the issues related to work place surveillance.(3) 

This week we have some interesting case law, the first stresses the importance of following the ACAS Code of Practice,(4) the second found that the imposition of Saturday working on a single mum was sex discrimination,(5) and the third and most thorny case, Maya Forstater v CGD Europe UKEAT/0105/20/JOJ, held that, ‘gender critical beliefs’ meet the threshold of ‘philosophical beliefs’ as defined by the Equality Act 2010.(6) This now means that employers must not only protect staff from ‘trans-phobic’ comments but also protect the rights of ‘gender critical’ staff to assert their ‘genuinely held’ beliefs that gender is static. It’s easy when you think about it?!