Business transfers and the "multi-factorial" approach
Published on: 08/11/2016
Article Authors The main content of this article was provided by the following authors.
Dr John McMullen Partner
Dr John McMullen Partner
Dr john mcmullen

John is an employment Partner at Spencer West as well as being Visiting Professor of Law at Leeds University Business School and serving on the editorial board of ELA Briefing, the journal of the Employment Lawyers Association. He was previously Head of Employment at Pinsent Masons.

John is one of the UK's leading employment lawyers with a national and international reputation. He is the country's leading expert on TUPE and is involved in a wide range of TUPE related matters, including service provision change, mergers and acquisitions, and public sector and third sector transfers.

He has been variously described as “the King of TUPE” and the “TUPE guru”. He is an expert in redundancies and restructuring and also provides advice to senior executives on termination of employment.

He is also:

  • the author of Business Transfers and Employee Rights, the leading work on TUPE. First published in 1987, it is a loose-leaf encyclopedia, known affectionately as the “purple book”, and is subscribed to by all major law libraries and law firms and by the Bar
  • the author of Redundancy: The Law and Practice, the leading work on redundancy law
  • an editor of Harvey on Industrial Relations and Employment Law, commonly known as the practitioner’s “bible” and regularly cited in Court.

In the year 2000, in Cheesman v R Brewer Contracts Limited, Mr Justice Lindsay, the then President of the Employment Appeal Tribunal summarised the current rules on business transfers under the Acquired Rights Directive and the TUPE Regulations and coined a "multi-factorial" test for employment tribunals to use in deciding whether there has been a business transfer under TUPE.  Our featured case is one where an employment tribunal was criticised for not following the Cheesman multi-factorial approach.

Business transfers and the "multi-factorial" approach

In ALNO (UK) Ltd v Turner UKEAT/0349/15/DA the EAT considered whether there was a business transfer under regulation 3(1)(a) of TUPE following the termination of a franchise by a franchisee.

ALNO is part of a group

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Disclaimer The information in this article is provided as part of Legal Island's Employment Law Hub. We regret we are not able to respond to requests for specific legal or HR queries and recommend that professional advice is obtained before relying on information supplied anywhere within this article. This article is correct at 08/11/2016