Reviewed by: Graham Clayton
Author: Gillian Howard
Publisher: The Law Society
ISBN: 9781853287206
Price: £99.95

Any book about forms and precedents is a valuable addition to any practitioner’s library – and this one is no exception.

However, writing a book of forms and precedents in employment law is a courageous act, and the result could probably do with a ‘handle with care’ sticker attached to it.

Relations between employers and employees are governed by contracts and policies, which are formulated against a background of statutory minimum standards requirements.

Things can get pretty heated when employers and employees fall out, and when they do, on a large scale, there is a potential for a lot of damage to be done to the general well-being.

Avoiding these conflicts depends on securing employer/workforce consensus on the issues that have the potential to divide them.

So, documenting employer/employee relationships is very much a two–sided affair, at least where the workforce is unionised.

Both sides come to the negotiating table with their own models of what they want to achieve. It is well-nigh impossible to present a set of forms that can be deployed with endorsement from all parties.

Gillian Howard expresses the hope in her preface that her forms will ‘prove useful’ to legal practitioners and HR specialists in drafting employment contracts and policies.

They cannot, however, be more than ‘useful’.

The solicitor who offers these forms to clients as legally validated, non-negotiable instruments may be taken aback by workforce reaction.

There are some propositions contained in these models that, as a union legal adviser, I would certainly advise should not be accepted.

It might also actually be a mistake to call the models ‘precedents’ since this is a word which affords them a more objectively authoritative status than they can have. I prefer to call them ‘forms’.

To purists, there are a few irritants in the book.

For example, as a matter of law, it is better for employers to understand that no one is ever ‘made redundant’. Redundancy is a fact and, as a fact, it is a reason for dismissal.

‘Making someone redundant’, the often used but mistaken phrase, is not of itself dismissal.

It jars a little when explanations that seek to enlighten the reader in fact perpetuate common errors and myths. But to list these would be carping and unnecessary.

Provided that this work is not taken as an authoritative legal textbook – as it does not purport to be – it retains its value.

Tucked inside the back cover is a CD-ROM version of all the forms.

In an age when scarcely any business lacks a computer and a word processor, this raises the question why this work is not now marketed simply as a piece of software with a printed guide.

Still, no work loses it value by reason only of duplication, and the addition of the CD is a bonus.

The software, though, could be much improved. It is no more than a version of the forms as ‘Word’ documents which are read only on the CD itself, but which once completed can be ‘saved’ elsewhere.

Software that provides the facility for documents to be uniquely ‘personalised’ for the user would be a further enhancement.

Employees and those who hope to be employees do not, of course, draft contracts and policies for their employers to accept.

Employees are only rarely ‘offerors’ and only those whose job it is are the first authors of workplace policies.

So, naturally, this is a work for employers and those who advise them.

It is accommodatingly written, it is practical and it is certainly, as the author says, ‘useful’.

It starts with the legal formation of the employment relationship and it progresses comprehensively through the full range of familiar workplace issues, and indeed some of the less familiar ones.

Each chapter begins with a summary of the law and concludes with forms of contract, letters and policy documents appropriate to the subject matter.

The structure makes the book pleasingly accessible. It has a great deal more than its title’s reference to ‘contracts’ suggests.

The reader might feel that what is being offered is a collection of the forms that the author has happened to come across, rather than a comprehensive encyclopaedia of forms and precedents.

However, the author has clearly been a good collector.

Personally, I would take issue with some of the text, and with some of the content of the suggested forms.

Employee representatives would surely want to negotiate on many of the issues of policy and contract terms.

While this is a helpful book, it should be handled with care.

Graham Clayton is an education law consultant and former senior solicitor at the National Union of Teachers

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