Legal News

The UK's new offence of failure to prevent fraud comes into force on 1 September 2025. Large organisations could be held liable where employees, or others connected to the business, commit criminal conduct to benefit the company. Created by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 ( ECCTA 2023), the offence is touted as a tool to spark a shift in corporate culture. The intention is to push firms to tighten their procedures so the UK’s enforcers can more effectively police fraud in Britain. The Serious Fraud Office ( SFO) and the Crown Prosecution Service ( CPS) have adopted tough language, vowing to pursue companies that fail to comply. Yet lawyers do not anticipate a flood of prosecutions or corporate plea agreements, and any that do arise are expected to take years to materialise. ‘ For most in-scope companies, the house isn’t on fire,’ said Lloyd...

Global Data (formerly known as Progressive Digital Media On 26 August 2025, the High Court held that Global Data could not resile from assurances that Andrew Dixon would still be permitted to exercise his share options after he was dismissed for not meeting performance targets. Judge James Brightwell rejected the company’s contention that its former chief executive had failed to inform Dixon that the options would remain effective. He characterised the refusal to honour the assurances given in autumn 2014 as unconscionable and considered the claimant entitled to a remedy. Dixon commenced legal proceedings in 2023, asserting that Global Data had gone back on an agreement allowing him to exercise share options......

In this issue: Benefits Prohibited conduct Maternity, parents and carers Performance, conduct and discipline Data protection and employee information Bribery, modern slavery, tax evasion and fraud Employment Tribunals Dates for your diary Trackers Employment resources on Lexis+® Lex Talk®Employment: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts Benefits Company cars: advisory fuel rates from 1 September From 1 September 2025, HMRC has updated the advisory fuel rates. A new public charging rate for fully electric cars has also been added. These figures are strictly for use only in situations where employers reimburse staff for business mileage in company cars, or require staff to repay the cost of fuel used for private journeys. See: LNB News 22/08/2025 18. High Court upholds claim for proprietary estoppel based on employer’s assurances that share options would continue...

Following its creation in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 ( ECCTA 2023), the failure to prevent fraud offence is scheduled to take effect on 1 September 2025. Under ECCTA 2023, s 199, large organisations can be made answerable for fraudulent conduct by employees, agents, subsidiaries, or others providing services for, or on behalf of, the organisation, where the wrongdoing was intended to benefit the organisation or its clients. For a case to proceed, at least one element of the underlying fraud must have occurred in the UK, or the gain or loss arising from it must have been realised in the UK. Businesses do, however, have a potential defence, as set out in the government’s guidance on the offence. Reasonable procedure In November 2024, the government issued guidance describing the reasonable procedures that companies should adopt if they are to stand a chance of...

In this issue: Diversity and gender pay gap Whistleblowing Data protection and employee information Employment tribunals Dates for your diary Trackers Employment resources on Lexis+® Lex Talk®Employment: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts Diversity and gender pay gap Law firms silent as they struggle to close partner pay gap Research from the new Law360 Gender Pay Gap Tool shows that one in two of the UK’s top-earning practices decline to disclose partner gender pay disparities, notwithstanding appeals for transparency since the framework began eight years ago. Statutory duties cover gaps for employees alone, leaving firms free to choose if, and in what form, they reveal inequality within partnerships. As a result, benchmarking is difficult and assessing progress is fraught, as organisations can alter presentation of figures or cease publication entirely. In 2024, 39 of the 111 firms...

By law, employers must publish pay gap figures solely for their staff, leaving law firms to choose if and how they reveal disparities within partnerships. This flexibility materially hampers like-for-like comparisons over time and obscures any sense of progress, as firms can alter how they present their numbers or drop publication entirely. In 2024, 39 of the 111 firms reviewed by Law360 voluntarily shared a business-wide median pay gap—a weighted blend of partner and employee gaps—across their operations. The average stood at 33.8%, versus 26.7% for employees alone during the same period. Of the 51 firms that issued a separate partner-only gap for 2024, the median was 24.7%, an increase of 2.8 percentage points on 2023 figures. Female representation in partnerships also trails noticeably. Women account for just 37% of partners in the UK, according to data from the Solicitors...

The failure to prevent fraud offence Introduced by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 ( ECCTA 2023) as part of wider efforts to combat financial crime, the failure to prevent fraud offence takes effect on 1 September 2025 and is intended to drive a meaningful, positive shift in corporate culture. This is the latest in the suite of corporate “failure to prevent” offences, following the failure to prevent bribery under the Bribery Act 2010 ( BA 2010) and the failure to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion in the Criminal Finances Act 2017. The offence is contained in ECCTA 2023, ss 199–206. Its purpose is to ensure large organisations are accountable for fraud carried out by employees, agents, subsidiaries, or others who provide services for or on behalf of the organisation, where the conduct was intended to benefit the...

Analysis by Law360 Across 100 UK firms, men received average bonuses 31.2% higher than women in 2024, even though similar proportions of men and women were awarded bonuses that year. The difference was 26.8% in 2023. Specialists suggest that bonus disparities are often driven by a small number of particularly large awards. They also note that closing the bonus gap is proving more challenging than addressing base pay, partly because men still dominate higher-billing commercial practices. Solicitors Regulation Authority figures from 2023 show men outnumber women in corporate, financial, criminal and intellectual property roles, and the imbalance grows at partnership level. Women comprise only 30% of corporate law partners and 26% of full-equity partners in that practice area, compared with 47% at the beginning of their careers. ‘ This is a persistent issue and, frankly, one we need to stop tiptoeing around’, said Hannah Bradshaw,...

How have plans for UK data protection reform evolved since Brexit? Since Brexit, the UK’s approach to data protection reform has ebbed and flowed markedly, with successive governments seeking to carefully balance innovation, economic growth and individuals’ rights. The Conservative government aimed to pivot to a GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation) lite regime by introducing the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. That bill outlined a series of business‑friendly amendments to existing data protection rules and progressed reasonably well through parliament, only to be ultimately shelved following a change of government in 2024. Once in office, the Labour‑led administration reignited the agenda, bringing forward the Data ( Use and Access) Bill ( DUAB). While retaining the core UK GDPR framework, DUAB set out targeted reforms that indicate a shift towards a more UK‑specific regime centred on data‑driven innovation, enhanced public services and strong data...

In this issue: Tax Diversity and gender pay gap Employment Tribunals Industrial Relations Law Reports ( IRLR)— September 2025 Dates for your diary Trackers New Q& As Employment resources on Lexis+® Lex Talk® Employment: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts Tax Legislation Day: Draft Finance Bill 2026—tackling non-compliance in the umbrella company market Legislation Day 2025 brought the release of draft Finance Bill 2026 provisions which, if progressed into law, would make agencies and end clients jointly and severally accountable for any Pay As You Earn ( PAYE) and National Insurance Contributions ( NICs) failings by umbrella companies. In Tax analysis: Legislation Day: Draft Finance Bill 2026—tackling non-compliance in the umbrella company market, John Chaplin, a partner at BDO, reviews these...

In this issue: Pay Protected characteristics Prohibited conduct Prohibited conduct protection at work Equality of terms (equal pay) Individual rights arising from union membership ESG and sustainability: employment issues Financial services and banking: employment issues Employment Tribunals New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Employment resources on Lexis+® Lex Talk®Employment: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts Pay DBT publishes 2025 LPC remit for minimum wage recommendations The Department for Business and Trade ( DBT) has released a policy paper outlining the Low Pay Commission’s ( LPC) remit for 2025. In shaping its recommendations on National Minimum Wage ( NMW) and National Living Wage ( NLW) rates from 1 April 2026, the LPC is tasked with ensuring the NLW remains at least two-thirds of median earnings, while taking into...

Judge Timothy Parker upheld and confirmed the ban imposed by the English Blackball Pool Federation ( EBPF) on Harriet Haynes, stopping her from playing eight-ball pool for the women’s ‘ A’ team in Kent, in south-east England. He stated that the April 2025 Supreme Court decision—which found that transgender women are not protected as women for the purposes of discrimination under the Equality Act 2010—meant Haynes could pursue only gender reassignment discrimination, not sex discrimination. Yet there was no arguable case on gender reassignment discrimination because, as the Canterbury county court in Kent held, ‘there is no reasonable alternative way of achieving fair competition short of exclusion’. The county court completed hearing Haynes’ claim five days before the Supreme Court delivered its judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers [2025] IRLR 537. In the aftermath of that ruling, Parker...

Employment Tribunal ( ET) judge Patricia Tueje found that Serco Ltd’s 'sole or main purpose' in announcing, in May 2023, a 7% pay uplift publicly was to circumvent its collective bargaining with the Prison Officers’ Association ( POA). At that stage, talks conducted by the POA for the workforce had not concluded, the ET recorded in a decision released on 1 August 2025. According to the judgment dated 23 July 2025, the UK public services group had stopped seeking a negotiated settlement on pay; internal correspondence confirmed the stance was to 'hold the line'. Tueje J concluded that the company 'had made the conscious decision to no longer engage meaningfully in collective bargaining'. The ET held it was no longer seeking an agreed pay rise through negotiation......

The EAT ruled on 31 July 2025 that the government was not responsible for indirect discrimination against Louise Askester and 126 other care home employees simply for having published guidance on who could be excused from the jab, because that guidance did not exceed what statute demanded. Auerbach HHJ observed that, given its balanced and accurate statement of the law, and the consistent emphasis on advising employers about what was required to ensure compliance with the law, it was not realistically arguable that a tribunal could properly judge it fair, reasonable or just to hold the Secretary of State or the Department of Health and Social Care to account. In 2021, fresh UK rules mandated vaccination against COVID-19, for care home staff, save where a medical exemption applied under the relevant regulations at the time......

At the EAT, Judge Mary Stacey accepted several submissions advanced by Tesco in its protracted battle over an equal pay claim affecting 55,000 employees. The appeal concerned a demanding evidence-gathering exercise in which the tribunal had to determine whether two roles were comparable and what proof was adequate to support that conclusion. The EAT judge sided with Tesco and found that the Employment Tribunal ( ET) had fallen into a number of errors when assessing how to compare the roles of female shop staff with those of better-paid men working in distribution centres. The men operated as the comparators in the case. One such mistake, the EAT said, was the ET’s decision to exclude certain performance targets from the assessment of job value on the basis that they were ‘unreasonable’. However, Stacey J held that it is not for an ET to rule on the...

Lawyers for three unnamed individuals and the Good Law Project contended that elements of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s ( EHRC) guidance on which workplace toilets trans people may access are unlawful. Alex Goodman KC argued that, under workplace regulations on the provision of single-sex toilets, the terms men and women must be read as encompassing trans men and trans women. In a pre-action letter, the not-for-profit group and the individuals—a transgender woman, a transgender man and an intersex woman—stated in May that they intended to bring a legal challenge to the EHRC’s advice on using lavatories at work. They maintained that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 does not extend to legislation governing the use of lavatories, which contains no definition of ‘man’ or ‘woman’. The group is seeking permission from Judge Jonathan Swift to pursue judicial review to...

Regulatory specialists caution that numerous financial firms are ill-equipped for the fallout of altered requirements for senior leaders—the FCA’s plan to extend how long criminal record checks remain valid before appointments could make it easier for wrongdoers to slip into boardroom ranks without timely scrutiny or deterrence measures. The ‘failure to prevent fraud’ offence in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 ( ECCTA 2023) targets fraud by employees undertaken to advantage the business in practice. Under this provision, only the corporate entity faces prosecution directly. It covers financial services businesses satisfying any two of three thresholds: more than 250 staff; turnover above £36m; or assets exceeding £18m within the relevant accounting period for the organisation concerned. This simplification may expose regulated businesses to heightened infiltration by fraudsters and to follow-on liability under the ‘failure to prevent fraud’ offence where a fraud is carried out that...

In this issue: Immigration Pay Pensions Prohibited conduct (discrimination) Working time and flexible working Data protection and employee information Confidentiality, duties and restrictions: enforcement Financial services and banking: employment issues Issues arising on termination Employment Tribunals New and updated content Dates for your diary Trackers Employment resources on Lexis+® Lex Talk®Employment: a Lexis®Nexis community Daily and weekly news alerts Immigration Home Office announces operational partnership with delivery giants to combat illegal working The Home Office has unveiled an operational partnership with Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats to clamp down on illegal working in the UK’s delivery sector. Under the agreement, enforcement is strengthened by enabling delivery companies to receive information, including the locations of asylum hotels, to help identify misuse. The collaboration also introduces tighter security, such as facial...

Aviva’s research showed that 54% of men identify as the primary planner of retirement savings, compared with 35% of women. According to the insurer, this points to a potential disparity in confidence or involvement between genders, or that men are more inclined to claim financial know-how. The study, carried out by Censuswide for Aviva, drew on a survey of 2,000 adults. It also found that a notable share of mid-life savers admit to avoiding their pension decisions. 54% of men say they take the lead on retirement planning, versus 35% of women. Three in ten savers aged 45 to 54 confess to ‘burying their head in the sand’ about their pension. Joanne Phillips, Managing Director of Aviva’s direct wealth business, said it is ‘fascinating to see that while’......

Although dependency on substances has for many years been acknowledged as a workplace issue needing careful management, the rapid advance of digital technology has pushed newer forms of dependency into the spotlight. According to a recent BUPA survey, more than half of UK workers have grappled with some kind of addiction. Behavioural addictions cover a broad span of compulsive behaviours, including the excessive use of digital technologies. Reports indicate that roughly one in eight adults in the UK is affected by a behavioural addiction. Examples can include gambling, gaming, heavy internet use, social media, pornography consumption, online shopping, or compulsive cryptocurrency trading. A notable by-product of the coronavirus ( COVID-19) lockdowns was a rise in these digital forms of addiction. Employers can find it hard to tackle the effect such addictions have on performance at work, particularly where roles include an element of remote...