TUPE or to give it its proper title - The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Act, has been in place in since 1981 with amendments made in 2006. TUPE is a core piece of UK employment legislation, designed to preserve employees' terms and conditions when a business or undertaking, or part of one, is transferred to a new employer.

If you are an employer looking for TUPE advice, perhaps for the first time, then a good employment lawyer will certainly be able to help you understand the legal process and the interpretation of the large volume of TUPE case law since 1981. There are also good summaries available on their websites.

Our TUPE advice offers something rather different – from early TUPE advice required as part of a tender process through to full delivery of projects involving TUPE transfers OUT and IN – and covering every business discipline including management, operations, sales, finance and facilities. Our TUPE advice does far more than simply guide you safely through the legal framework, we help you focus on delivering a successful overall outcome which improves business efficiency, motivates staff, builds positive relationships and enhances brand identity.

We can offer you comprehensive, simple and useful TUPE advice because our consultants are qualified HR professionals, who have held responsibility for managing the outcome of many thousands of individual TUPE transfers. This puts us in an ideal position to ask the difficult questions required, and support you to provide the solutions. Typically these might include:

• What are you trying to achieve through this business transfer and where do you want to be in in six months time after this change?
• What are the key issues that can go wrong and make this a difficult business experience and how are you going to deliver full business continuity throughout the transfer period?
• What is a realistic timetable to deliver this?
• What messages and motivational points are you trying to get over?
• Can the business reorganise and restructure during the TUPE process?
• Can the business reorganise and restructure after the TUPE process?
• What exactly is ETO and does it apply here? ( ETO is an economic, technical or organisational reason entailing changes in the workforce)
• I can't have the one staff group on two sets of terms and conditions - so what can I do to harmonise the T's and C's?

Our consultants will give you sound practical TUPE advice based on their considerable experience of managing the TUPE process across mergers and acquisitions, disposals, outsourcing and insourcing initiatives. This means we are ideally equipped to act as trusted advisor, or to fully participate in or to lead the whole process – whichever role suits your business requirements.

Our lead consultant Richard Wilson has lead numerous TUPE transfer processes stemming from mergers and acquisitions and outsourcing initiatives. Richard is a Chartered Member of the Institute of Personnel and Development and has lead several large scale change programmes in UK and US owned businesses - both as the employer, consultant and project director.

If you would like to see if our TUPE advice could help you then please do contact us for an early exploratory conversation.