Miscellaneous

The Court of Appeal stresses that whether an employer will be vicariously liable for one employee’s violent actions towards another employee depends on whether there is a sufficiently close connection between what the employee is actually required to do and the violent action. Only if such violence can truly be said to be ‘in the course of employment’ will an employer be liable.

Tribunals have a wide discretion in discrimination cases as to whether they make a recommendation which binds an employer and what the scope of such a recommendation should be – and the EAT will rarely interfere with such discretion.

The automatic barring procedure introduced by the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 breaches the right to a fair trial in art. 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In a judicial review case brought by the Royal College of Nursing, the High Court held that including individuals convicted of certain offences on a list barring them from working with children and vulnerable adults, without first allowing them to make representations, was a breach of European law.

An employer has to pay statutory sick pay (SSP) to an employee who meets all the qualifying conditions even if it thinks that the employee’s injuries, and hence absence, are ‘self-inflicted’.