At the Conservative Party Conference today George Osborne announced that the Government intends to make it "much less risky for businesses to hire people". In particular the Government plans to increase the period before an employee can make an unfair dismissal claim from one to two years from April 2012. It will also introduce a fee for taking a case to an employment tribunal that "litigants only get back if they win".

This announcement is not entirely unexpected as last week BIS published a document confirming that the unfair dismissal period would be increased from one to two years and that fees would be introduced for lodging employment tribunal cases to tackle vexatious claims. Although BIS subsequently stated that the increase for unfair dismissal claims had not been confirmed many commentators considered it was merely a matter of time before formal confirmation was made.

To access the revised BIS publication please click here.

This article was written for Law-Now, CMS Cameron McKenna's free online information service. To register for Law-Now, please go to www.law-now.com/law-now/mondaq

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The original publication date for this article was 03/10/2011.