preston lancashire

United Kingdom Supreme Court=This case is about the employment status of individuals who are resident in Great Britain and are employed by a British company but who travel to and from home to work overseas. Halliburton Manufacturing & Services Ltd (“the appellant”) is a UK company which is based at Dyce, near Aberdeen. It is one of about 70 subsidiary or associated companies of Halliburton Inc, which is a US corporation. It supplies tools, services and personnel to the oil industry. The employee, Ismail Ravat (“the respondent”), lives in Preston, Lancashire and is a British citizen. He was employed by the appellant from 2 April 1990 as an accounts manager until he was dismissed with effect from 17 May 2006. The reason for his dismissal was redundancy. The respondent complains that he was unfairly dismissed. The complication in his case is that at the time of his dismissal he was working in Libya. The question is whether the employment tribunal has jurisdiction to consider his complaint. An employment tribunal sitting in Aberdeen (Mr RG Christie, sitting alone) held on 23 November 2007 that it had jurisdiction. That decision was set aside by the Employment Appeal Tribunal (Lady Smith, sitting alone) in a judgment which was given on 14 November 2008. The respondent appealed under section 37(1) of the Employment Tribunals Act 1996 to the Inner House of the Court of Session. On 22 June 2010 an Extra Division (Lord Osborne and Lord Carloway, Lord Brodie dissenting) allowed his appeal: 2011 SLT 44. The appellant now appeals to this court. The question whether the respondent’s complaint of unfair dismissal can be heard in Scotland is, as the decisions below show, not an easy one to answer. Section 94(1) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 provides: “An employee has the right not to be unfairly dismissed.” Section 230(1) of that Act provides that “employee” means an individual who has entered into or works under (or, where the employment has ceased, worked under) a contract of employment. Neither of these provisions contains any geographical limitation. Nor is any such limitation to be found anywhere else in the Act. As Lord Hoffmann observed in Lawson v Serco Ltd [2006] UKHL 3, [2006] ICR 250, para 1, the statement in section 244(1) that the Act extends to England and Wales and Scotland means only that it forms part of the law of Great Britain and does not form part of the law of any other territory, such as Northern Ireland (to which the subsection states the Act does not apply), for which Parliament could have legislated. Yet it is plain that some limitation must be implied. As Lady Hale noted in Duncombe v Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (No 2) [2011] UKSC 36, [2011] ICR 1312, para 5, it was agreed in that case that section 94(1) could not apply to all employment anywhere in the world. That must indeed be so: see also Lawson, para 6, where Lord Hoffmann said that all the parties in that case were agreed that the scope of section 94(1) must have some territorial limits. But this does not solve the problem as to where the line is to be drawn between those cases to which section 94(1) applies and those to which it does not. It is not straightforward. As Louise Merrett, The Extra-Territorial Reach of Employment Legislation (2010) 39 Industrial Law Journal 355, has pointed out, increasing labour mobility together with the proliferation of multinational companies and groups of companies has made the international aspects of employment law important in an ever-growing number of cases. The present case is an illustration of the problems that this gives rise to.

Hilary Term [2012] UKSC 1 On appeal from: [2010] CSIH 52 JUDGMENT Ravat (Respondent) v Halliburton Manufacturing and Services Ltd (Appellant) (Scotland) before Lord Hope, Deputy President Lady Hale Lord Brown Lord Mance Lord Kerr JUDGMENT GIVEN ON 8 February 2012 Heard on 22 November 2011 Appellant Respondent John Cavanagh QC Aidan O’Neill QC Christine … Continue reading →