Practical Law

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

2014 Budget:

• The Chancellor, George Osborne, has made his Budget Statement to the House of Commons, which included various policy announcements of interest to public sector lawyers.

Central government:

• The Public Interest Disclosure (Prescribed Persons) (Amendment) Order 2014 comes into force on 6 April 2014 and will add MPs to the list of prescribed persons for the purposes of the whistleblowing legislation.
• A written ministerial statement has been laid before Parliament which outlines a number of changes to the Immigration Rules, most of which will take effect from 6 April 2014.

Civil litigation:

• The Courts and Tribunal Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2014 has been approved by Parliament and will come into force on 6 April 2014.
• The Court of Appeal has considered the mens rea necessary for the criminal offence of attempting to commit a money laundering offence under section 327 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (R v Pace and another).
• The High Court has highlighted concerns about a litigant in person cross-examining a party who had accused him of perpetrating a sexual offence against her (Re B (A child) (Private law fact finding) (Unrepresented father)).
• The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court has refused to extend time for service of the claim form under CPR 7.6(3) and refused to retrospectively authorise alternative service under CPR 6.15(2) (MB Garden Buildings Ltd v Mark Burton Construction Ltd and another).
• The Law Commission of England and Wales has announced a further limited consultation regarding first draft clauses from the Insurance Contracts Bill.

Education and social services:

• The High Court has:
  • upheld an injunction preventing disclosure to the police and the Financial Conduct Authority of information or documents in proceedings under Schedule 1 to the Children Act 1989 (Y v Z); and
  • quashed a local authority’s decision not to disregard the value of an individual’s home when assessing whether she should pay for care home fees (R (Walford) v Worcestershire County Council).
• The Court of Protection has upheld an unwritten advance decision refusing life-sustaining treatment communicated to doctors by a seriously ill patient, even though it did not satisfy the conditions in section 25 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Foundation Trust v LM).
• The House of Lords Select Committee has published its post-legislative scrutiny of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, which recommends that a single independent body be given responsibility for overseeing the future implementation of the Act.

Employment and pensions:

• The Children and Families Act 2014 received Royal Assent on 13 March 2014, which will introduce several changes for working parents.
• The Courts and Tribunals Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments) Order 2014 has been published, which increases the fees for certain types of employment tribunal claim.
• The EAT has:
  • upheld the ET’s decision that covert recordings made by an employee of the public and private discussions of the panel at her grievance and disciplinary hearings could be admitted as evidence at a final hearing (Punjab National Bank (International) Ltd and others v Gosain);
  • upheld a tribunal’s decision that a woman, who was dismissed having been off sick with post-natal depression for several months after the end of her maternity leave, had not been discriminated against because of pregnancy or sex (Lyons v DWP Jobcentre Plus);
  • held that a tribunal erred in its approach to calculating protective awards arising from an employer’s failure to provide union representatives with comprehensive information about its agency workers during redundancy and TUPE consultation (London Borough of Barnet v Unison and another); and
  • overturned a tribunal’s finding that an employee of a residential care home had been unfairly dismissed for failing to tell the employer that he and his wife had been named as beneficiaries in the will of one of the residents (Eastland Homes Partnership Limited v Cunningham).
• The government has announced the increases in the national minimum wage that will take effect from 1 October 2014.
• The Deputy Pensions Ombudsman has ruled that a medical expert must be “independent” within the intrinsic meaning of the word in order to act as an independent registered medical practitioner who can certify as to an applicant’s eligibility for ill-health early retirement benefits under the LGPS (Major).
• The Local Government Pension Scheme (Transitional Provisions, Savings and Amendment) Regulations 2014 have been laid before Parliament and the GAD has issued a bulletin to confirm its change of policy on broad comparability assessments.

Environment:

• The Waste (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2014, which simplify waste transfer notes, come into force on 6 April 2014.
• The European Commission has published a draft Regulation setting out the details of the implementation of the EU greenhouse gas inventory.
• Defra is consulting on the environmental report for the Strategic Environmental Assessment for the draft Rural Development Programme in England.

FOI and data protection:

• The European Parliament has voted in plenary in support of the report of its Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee on the draft General Data Protection Regulation.
• The Court of Appeal has ruled that correspondence from 2004-5 between the Prince of Wales and several government departments should be published, following a freedom of information request by a Guardian journalist (R (Evans) v HM Attorney General and another).

Health:

• Monitor has published its report on the proposed merger of the pathology services in Sussex.

Housing:

• The Court of Appeal has allowed a defence under Article 8 of the ECHR to a housing possession claim against an introductory tenant (Southend-On-Sea Borough Council v Armour).
• The Welsh Government is consulting on changing the eligibility regulations for the allocation of housing and homelessness assistance.

Local government:

• The Marriage of Same Sex Couples (Registration of Shared Buildings) Regulations came into force on 13 March 2014, which set out the procedure for the registration of buildings shared by more than one religious organisation for the marriage of same sex couples.
• The High Court has dismissed an application for judicial review challenging a council’s policy to introduce a licensing scheme for certain noisy forms of busking (Keep Streets Alive Campaign Limited v London Borough of Camden).
• The LGO has published its first adverse findings notice against a social care provider.

Property and planning:

• The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (Amendment and Consequential Provisions) (England) Order 2014 comes into force on 6 April 2014.
• The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (Amendment) (Wales) Order 2014 and the Town and Country Planning (Compensation) (Wales) Regulations 2014 come into force on 28 April 2014.
• The Building Regulations &c (Amendment) Regulations 2014 come into force on 6 April 2014.
• The High Court has considered the application of Article 8 of the ECHR to an application for possession made by a private landowner (Manchester Ship Canal Developments Ltd and another v Persons Unknown and others).
• The Land Registry has announced that it plans to launch two new services to business users, MapSearch and Online Owner Verification.

Public procurement and state aid:

• The Cabinet Office has announced that the new procurement directives will come into force on 17 April 2014.
• A European Commission notice on state aid recovery interest rates and reference/discount rates applicable from 1 April 2014 has been published in the Official Journal.

Regulation and enforcement:

• The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 has received Royal Assent.