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.
Introduction
This month we report on a case where senior employees of a transferor deliberately enhanced the benefits and conditions with a view to passing them on to a transferee. How often has that happened to you, or a client transferee? Well, a recent UK EAT decision suggests the transferring employer/employee might not be able to get away with it.
The Ferguson case
Ferguson v Astrea Asset Management Ltd UKEAT/0139/19 is massively important. The EAT has held that when directors/employees improved their contractual benefits in view of a pending transfer, these variations were either void or fell foul of the EU abuse of law principle.
Reg 4(4) of TUPE, properly interpreted in a “broad purposive” way consistently with EU
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