Ian Smith reviews some interesting contrasts in recent employment case law
Rather unusually, the case law in the last month contained three sets of, in effect, paired cases which provide interesting contrasts. The first pair concerned the concept of the “service provision change” (SPC) in TUPE law, the second the perpetual problem of where to draw the line on the territorial jurisdiction of British employment tribunals and the third the difficult area of discrimination arising from disability.
Service provision changes—the problem
Much of the case law on whether an individual was or was not “assigned” to the organised grouping of employees that is subject to an SPC has concerned current, active employees, and the question whether they were sufficiently connected to the (part of) undertaking being transferred. However, two contemporaneous cases recently concerned a wholly different problem, namely where there is clearly a SPC and the organised grouping is equally clear, but the twist is that the employee in question was not actually working on the task in question immediately before the transfer, in BT Managed Services Ltd v Edwards
