How is the EU law thread in Agnew to be applied to the rest of the UK? Charles Pigott reports
- The Supreme Court has—at long last—clarified the meaning of the phrase “series of deductions” which is used to calculate the time limit for unlawful deductions claims across the whole of the UK.
- However, the excision of the general principles of EU law from domestic law on 31 December 2023 could mean that other aspects of the ruling have a more limited shelf-life.
There are two distinct threads running through the Supreme Court’s decision in Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland v Agnew [2023] UKSC 33, [2023] All ER (D) 14 (Oct). The first—deriving from the general principles of EU law—conferred on police officers in Northern Ireland the same rights to recover historical underpayments of holiday pay as their civilian colleagues. Once this parity had been established by reading additional words into the Working Time Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1998 (SI 1998/386), the Supreme Court turned to purely domestic principles of statutory interpretation to establish the meaning
