Ian Smith investigates some rare sightings of dismissal law controversy
When spending idle hours reading the notes to the statutes in Division Q of Harvey, one of the things that can strike you is how immutable the law of unfair dismissal has been for the last 42 years. Not only has the legislation hardly changed, except for the odd politically sensitive point such as the length of the qualifying period, but much of the leading case law is now remarkably old, having laid down the principal points of interpretation at an early stage in this law’s history. Just occasionally, however, we still get the occasional controversy or necessary touch on the tiller (just as we still get cases on the meaning of “redundancy”—as Judge Clark has been known to point out, how can we expect anything else when the statutory definition has only been with us for 49 years?!). Unusually, the three cases chosen for this month’s column all concern basic concepts of dismissal law—the first is about how to define gross misconduct leading to lawful summary dismissal, the
