We overworked and underpaid personnel practitioners have enough real problems to worry about, without Personnel Today trying to frighten us with fictitious bogeymen!
I refer to the article on your website by Daniel Thomas on the subject of the new dispute and disciplinary rules, headlined New dismissal rules make it harder to sack employees (News, personneltoday.com, 20 September).
The new statutory procedure has three stages, not 13, and I believe the vast majority of responsible employers will have to make little effort to comply with them, apart from introducing the step of putting invitations to disciplinary meetings in writing.
Thomas’ assertion that the new rules will make it harder to sack employees is only partly true. They will make it very difficult to sack an employee unfairly, and that is surely no bad thing, since it should never be a simple matter to deprive someone of their livelihood in any case.
I have revised my organisation’s procedure to accommodate the new rules, and did not find it difficult to do. Like most personnel managers, over the past few months I have been on the receiving end of a lot of unsolicited literature from the legal profession, attempting to drum up business on the basis that Armageddon is coming, and only the employment lawyers can save us.
Alistair McIntosh
Group personnel manager, Balmoral Group
Editor’s reply: The 13-step guide is a DTI measure, and the assertion that the rules will make it harder to sack employees came from legal experts.
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‘Scaremongering is not our intention, but business groups such as the Federation of Small Businesses and law firms have warned that companies that are not aware of the legislation may be caught out financially. Hence we reported this.
