Practical Law

Make sure that you have not missed a key development in your area of the law by reading our latest In brief review of the Practical Law Public Sector e-mail for the week ending 14 August 2013.

Replacing our recommended actions, In brief will include a one sentence summary of all of the legal developments reported in our weekly e-mail to make sure that no matter how busy our subscribers are, they can still keep in touch with all the latest developments.

Civil litigation:

• The Civil Procedure (Amendment No 7) Rules 2013 will come into force on 1 October 2013.

Commercial:

• The government has published two draft regulations implementing consumer law reform proposals in addition to the reforms proposed in the Draft Consumer Rights Bill.

Education and children’s services:

• The School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Order 2013 has been laid before Parliament.
• The government has published its response to reports by the Children’s Commissioner on school exclusions.

Employment and pensions:

• The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 (Consequential Amendments) (Employment) Order 2013 (SI 2013/1956) (which renames compromise agreements as “settlement agreements” in primary legislation) is due to come into force on 30 August 2013. 
• The Court of Appeal has restored the decision of an employment tribunal that an employee had not been unfairly dismissed for theft, even though he was acquitted in a criminal trial (Stuart v London City Airport Ltd).
• The EAT has held that an employer breached section 10 of the Employment Relations Act 1999 when it refused an employee’s request to be accompanied at a grievance hearing by a certified union officer (Toal and another v GB Oils Ltd).
• The Practice Direction (Employment Appeal Tribunal – Procedure) 2013 came into force on 29 July 2013.
• The Deputy Pensions Ombudsman has determined that an employee who takes voluntary redundancy is dismissed “by reason of redundancy” for the purposes of qualifying for an unreduced early retirement pension under regulation E3A of the National Health Service Pension Scheme Regulations 1995 (Determination in a complaint by Mrs D S Fenteman-Coates).
• The DWP has published a research report on the opt-out rates of large employers in the first six months of auto-enrolment.

Environment:

• The DCLG has published Planning practice guidance for renewable and low carbon energy.
• Defra has published a consultation on the Waste Prevention Programme for England.

Freedom of information and data protection:

• The Freedom of Information (Release of Datasets for Re-use) (Fees) Regulations 2013 (which govern the fees that public bodies can charge for the release of datasets under FOIA) have been made. The Information Commissioner’s Office has also published a blog and guidance on the dataset changes, which come into force on 1 September 2013.
• The First-tier Tribunal (Information Rights) has ruled that:
  • the reasons for a headteacher’s long-term sickness absence from his school did not have to be disclosed under FOIA because they constituted personal data, but whether the headteacher was being paid a salary during his absence must be disclosed (Innes v Information Commissioner);
  • the London Borough of Camden was correct to refuse to disclose the number of hours its employees worked and how much overtime they were paid as this would infringe their rights under the Data Protection Act 1998 (Voyias v Information Commissioner); and
  • requests made to a parish council under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) relating to that parish council’s handling of previous FOIA requests were vexatious (Harvey v Information Commissioner and Walberswick Parish Council).
• The ICO has updated its guidance on public companies subject to FOIA, to take into account the definition of “publicly-owned companies” introduced into FOIA by the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.
• The High Court has upheld a decision to retain non-biometric police records, despite no action being taken against the man to whom the records relate after his arrest nearly nine years ago (R (TD) v The Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis and another).
• The Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (Code of Practice for Surveillance Camera Systems and Specification of Relevant Authorities) Order 2013 has come into force.
• The Information Commissioner’s Office has published a code of practice to assist organisations in dealing with data subject access requests made under section 7 of the Data Protection Act 1998.
• The Information Commissioner’s Office is consulting on a draft code of practice on conducting privacy impact assessments, which will replace its current Privacy Impact Assessment Handbook.

Health:

• The High Court has refused a judicial review claim against Worcestershire County Council’s decision to cut funding for disabled adult community care (R (D) v Worcestershire County Council).
• The LGA and NHS England have published a statement on the health and social care Integration Transformation Fund.

Judicial review:

• The High Court has ruled that in a judicial review claim, there should be no order as to costs where the applicant had withdrawn the claim on the basis the substantive hearing was no longer required as it had won its parallel appeal against the decision being reviewed (Speciality Produce v Secretary of State).

Local government:

• The LGA has published a report on how councils have used the general power of competence.

Property and planning:

• The Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber) has found in favour of a residential tenant of a long lease who challenged water charges that were recovered through her service charge (Wallace-Jarvis v Optima (Cambridge) Ltd and others).
• The DCLG has published guidance for local councils summarising their legal powers to act against unlawful encampments.
• The DCLG is consulting on allowing further flexibilities to allow changes of use of property between use classes.

Public procurement and state aid:

• Monitor has announced that it has opened an investigation under the National Health Service (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) (No 2) Regulations 2013 into the commissioning by NHS England of cancer surgery services in Greater Manchester.
• The European Commission has published in the Official Journal a formal invitation for comments on its latest draft of a new, revised de minimis state aid regulation.
• The OECD has published a paper containing details of a policy roundtable discussion on the methods for allocating contracts for the provision of regional and local transportation services.