Employment Act 2008
The long-awaited repeal of Part 3 of the Employment Act 2002 and the Employment Act 2002 (Dispute Resolution) Regulations 2004 takes effect today. The provisions were ill-thought out, over-complicated and almost universally unpopular: see (e.g.) Ding Dong the witch is dead!
It would be nice to be able to say that the regime had simply been swept away as if it had never existed, but unfortunately unmaking bad law is never as simple as that.
One difficulty is that the law has to change on a particular date, but there will always be cases where some of the relevant events happened before that date, and others after. That means there have to be what is called ‘transitional provisions’ – rules about what happens to cases caught between the old system and the new. Besides, face has to be saved; the Department responsible has to pretend at least to think there is something worth salvaging out of all the time and money it wasted changing the law in the first place – so saying “whoops, sorry everyone, bad idea, let’s just go back to how we were” isn’t an option.
We’re working on a brief guide to the new regime and the transitional provisions, which we’ll publish here before too long.
