The Government has announced that two significant proposed changes to the Transfer of Undertaking (Protection of Employment) (TUPE) Regulations 2006 will now not go ahead following the result of its consultation, although slight amendments will be made to them.
An overwhelming majority of respondents said that they wanted to keep the rules regarding “service provision changes” (SPCs) and also did not want to repeal the transferor’s obligation to provide employee liability information.
The changes that will now be presented to Parliament in December for implementation provisionally in January next year, although no firm date has yet been set, include allowing renegotiation of terms derived from collective agreements one year after the transfer and provide expressly for a static approach to the transfer of terms derived from collective agreements.
In addition, changes in the location of the workforce following a transfer can 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.
They also say that for there to be a TUPE service provision change, the activities carried on after the change in service provision must be “fundamentally or essentially the same” as those carried on before it.
The changes will also improve the TUPE process for micro businesses by allowing such businesses to inform and consult directly affected employees when there is no recognised independent union, nor any existing appropriate representatives and also retain the rules about employee liability information, but extend the time before the transfer when it must be given to the transferee to 28 days.
Announcing the Government’s response, Employment Relations Minister Jo Swinson said that the changes will remove the unfair legal risks that businesses currently face, giving them more legal certainty in what they can do and reducing the bureaucracy of a transfer.