Northern Ireland is leading way on domestic violence and miscarriage workplace leave

Northern Ireland is ‘trailblazing’ laws on workplace leave in cases of domestic violence leave and miscarriage, according to the Labour Relations Agency.

However, more than 30 important employment laws are languishing as a Stormont stalemate and the lack of an executive has seen a backlog grow increasingly behind equivalent Westminster legislation.

Chief executive of the Labour Relations Agency, Don Lesson, explained that the pieces of legislation are important for employers and employees to be aware of:

“The new legislation, which was a private member's bill that went through at the end of the last assembly on domestic violence, provides for victims of domestic abuse to have what they call safe leave, so they're able to take 10 days leave,” he said.

“It provides space to sort their life, deal with the consequences.”

As part of its work on raising awareness on employment law for both workers and their employers, the Labour Relations Agency is collaborating with the Department for the Economy on the domestic violence law, which received Royal Assent in May.

The primary legislation has been passed, it's not been enacted yet,” Mr Lesson explained.

“We're waiting on the department to enact that, but we're working with them to do the guidance around all that for employers and employees around explaining what the legislation is.”

As well as the Domestic Violence (Safe Space) Bill, there was a flurry of legislation passed before the collapse of the current Assembly.

“Last December MLAs rushed through a number of private members' bills, because they obviously knew they weren't going to be coming back for a while,” he said. “Some of the stuff was quite radical.

“Another area of trailblazing was to amend the parental bereavement leave, which was brought in in Great Britain and gave rights to parents to have leave in child loss and so on.

When that went through, it was amended by the MLA's to include leave for miscarriage. New Zealand is the only other country in the world that has this in place.”

But Mr Lesson warned that Northern Ireland could be facing an employment law crisis.

“Something like 30 odd pieces of law that have been passed in Westminster have not been passed here around employment law,” he said.

“And, as Northern Ireland tends to follow parity with GB, all that legislation's backed up and come through, and GB's very active at doing more things.”

The Labour Relations boss said that Article Two of the Northern Ireland protocol could also lead to issues that were not anticipated at the time.

“The article is a ‘non-regression clause’, which means that Northern Ireland's legislation has to keep a number of rights the same and can't be reduced,” explained Mr Lesson.

“Anything that Great Britain passes as legislation to say take away sexual discrimination against women, for example, that would be a regressive and that would be unlawful under Article Two. That couldn't happen here, but there's a debate about whether Article Two means that we have to keep pace with EU legislation.

“For example there's a piece of legislation on carers leave in which all EU member states had to have carer's leave legislation by August 1. Great Britain, paradoxically, has met that while Northern Ireland has not.”