Government publish TUPE consultation response

The Government has issued its response to the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations (TUPE) 2006: consultation on proposed changes. The changes are not as radical as was thought might be and in particular service provision transfers have not been removed from the Regulations as was initially proposed.

The TUPE Regulations will be amended to:

• allow renegotiation of terms derived from collective agreements one year after the transfer, provided that overall the change is no less favourable to the employee.
• provide expressly for a static approach to terms transferred under collective agreements.
• allow changes in the location of a workforce following a transfer to be within the scope of economic, technical or organisational reasons entailing changes in the workforce - thereby preventing genuine place of work redundancies from being automatically unfair.
• reflect the approach of case law with regard to service provision changes - i.e. for there to be a service provision transfer the activities carried on after the transfer must be "fundamentally or essentially the same" as those carried on before it.
• require the transferor to provide employee liability information to the transferee 28 days before the transfer (rather than the current 14).
• bring Regulation 4 and Regulation 7 closer to the language of the Acquired Rights Directive.

The Government will also amend the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 to make it clear that pre-transfer consultation with transferring employees can count for the purposes of redundancy collective consultation requirements.

Micro businesses (those with less than 10 employees) will be helped by being allowed to inform and consult directly with affected employees where no recognised union or employee representatives are already in place.

Regulations are expected to be laid before Parliament in December 2013. Click here to read the consultation response document.

The changes to the TUPE Regulations are just one of the subjects covered by the Law on Tour workshops we run with the CIPD. Click here to see more about the workshops and book your place.