The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has warned that consumer landlords are still being presented with potentially unfair terms in contracts with some letting agents. The warning follows the enforcement case last year against Foxtons for breaching the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 (UTCCR). Foxtons agreed to amend some of its terms concerning
The right to request time off for training will not be extended to SME employees for at least four years. The Government made the announcement after studying the responses to a public consultation which began last year. Staff at firms employing 250 people or more were given the right to request time off for training
A company director has been held personally liable for the discriminatory dismissal of a pregnant employee. The director owned and ran an estate agency. He was the sole shareholder. One of his employees gave him a letter confirming that she was pregnant. Within minutes of reading the letter, he told her that she was being
Many buy to let landlords buying a new property rely on the valuation carried out by the surveyor acting on behalf of the mortgage lender. Until now they have been reasonably secure in doing so because the law accepted that these surveyors owed a duty of care to the purchaser. It meant that if the
Companies entering into contracts with businesses abroad need to take care over the small print if they want any future disputes to be settled under UK law. Failure to do so could prove costly, as one UK company recently discovered. The company entered into an agreement with an Indian supplier to provide it with condoms
Many businesses are failing to take simple steps that could protect them against late payers, according to research by the Institute of Credit Management (ICM). A survey of ICM members found that a quarter of them don’t use the payment performance data provided by B2B credit reference reports. Researchers also found that two thirds of
The number of businesses operating from people’s homes has increased dramatically over the last year. Research by Lloyds TSB Business Insurance revealed there are currently 5.9m home-based businesses in the UK. More than a quarter of them were set up in the last year. The new businesses cover a wide spectrum from IT and computer
There is to be a new Unitary Patent providing protection across 25 countries in the European Union. The move is designed to help European firms protect themselves against the growing problem of copyright piracy. One of the difficulties at the moment is that there is no single patent covering the whole of Europe. Firms have
The Court of Appeal has ruled that a landlord did not have to decorate a disabled tenant’s flat so that he could fully “enjoy” the property. The case involved a tenant who suffered from epilepsy. The tenancy agreement required tenants to decorate and clean the property as often as was necessary to keep it in
The Government’s Red Tape challenge website has put the spotlight on the Equality Act which came into effect last year. The Act replaced nine major pieces of legislation and scrapped 100 sets of regulations relating to equality and discrimination. Now ministers are asking businesses and voluntary organisations for ideas on what more can be done