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John Turnbull - BPE Solicitors
Online advisor - 2 posts
Short time working occurs when employees are laid off for a number of contractual days each week, or for a number of hours during a working day.
An employee is considered to be on short time for a week if during that week he gets less than half a week’s pay. The proposed reduction in hours from 40 to 32 is unlikely to fit the criteria for short time working, in which case you are therefore looking at a contractual variation of the employee’s terms of employment. As such, you will need the employee’s consent to vary or reduce the normal working hours, either express or implied, failing which, any attempt to impose a variation will be a breach of contract any may result in an unfair dismissal claim.
You should therefore consult. The business rationale behind this variation is to avoid redundancies. During the consultation period to reduce hours, if you are not reducing everyone’s hours, when selecting you will need to ensure that any selection is made fairly and not for a reason relating to e.g. age, race, sex, disability, religion etc. This list is not definitive.
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John Turnbull - BPE Solicitors
Online advisor - 2 posts
Employers are obliged under the Data Protection Act 1998 to adhere to eight data protection principles. The first principle is that personal information is fairly and lawfully processed which means that personal information must not be obtained or used unless either the employee has consented or one of a limited range of conditions has been met.
The second principle is that personal information is obtained and processed only for specified and lawful purposes (i.e. that it is used only for clearly agreed purposes), in this case for the purposes of an insurance claim.
The third principle is that the personal information is adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to its stated purpose (i.e. not storing more information than is necessary about a person).
Therefore, on a practical note, you may wish to ask the insurance company to give reasons why the entire personnel file is required as, as you have identified, there are likely to be details on file which are likely to be irrelevant to the claim.
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