7OS01 Assignment Example

7OS01 Advanced Employment Law in Practice is one of the most rigorous specialist units on the CIPD Level 7 Advanced Diploma, sitting within the Organisational Specialism strand alongside 7OS04 Diversity and Inclusion, 7OS05 International HR, and 7OS06 Wellbeing at Work. The unit examines the legal framework for employment regulation in the UK, the law on discrimination, the law governing employment contracts, and the regulatory landscape covering health and safety, working time, family rights and collective relations. The assessment uses the standard four-answer format: four assessment criteria drawn from four different Learning Outcomes, each answered in approximately 1,000 words. This 7OS01 assignment example walks through four Distinction-standard sample answers — sources of law, the Equality Act 2010, dismissal law, and family-friendly rights — written so you can see how the marking criteria of focus, depth and breadth, strategic application, research, persuasiveness and presentation apply to a unit that demands accurate legal analysis alongside HR judgement.

Question 1 (AC 1.1) — Major sources of UK employment law and its evolution

“Discuss the major sources of employment law and its evolution, including the major employment rights. Critically evaluate how this body of law has developed over recent decades and the principal influences on its current form.”

UK employment law is best understood as a layered body drawn from five distinct sources, each contributing different kinds of norm and each operating under different institutional logics. The five are: common law developed by the courts; primary legislation enacted by Parliament; secondary legislation made under statutory authority; retained EU law and its continuing influence; and codes of practice that, while not law in the strict sense, are admissible in tribunal proceedings and exert significant practical authority. The evolution of this layered system over the past forty years tells the story of how a residual common-law framework has been progressively overlaid with statutory rights, and how those statutory rights have shifted in response to political, economic and supranational pressure.

The common law remains the foundation. Contracts of employment are governed primarily by general principles of contract law as developed by the courts over centuries, supplemented by judicial doctrines specific to employment such as the implied duty of mutual trust and confidence affirmed in Malik v Bank of Credit and Commerce International [1997] UKHL 23. Wrongful dismissal — termination in breach of the contract — remains a common-law remedy. The strength of the common-law tradition is its flexibility: courts can develop doctrines incrementally to meet new factual situations. Its weakness is that the common law operates by litigation, which is expensive, slow and accessible mainly to those whose claims are large enough to justify the cost.

Primary legislation has been the dominant source of new employment rights since the 1960s. The Employment Rights Act 1996 consolidates much of the law on dismissal, redundancy and statutory employment particulars; the Equality Act 2010 consolidates discrimination law across nine protected characteristics; the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 establishes a statutory wage floor; the Working Time Regulations 1998 implement working-time and holiday-pay protections; the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 establishes the framework of employer duty in this area. Each of these statutes addresses an aspect of the employment relationship that the common law either failed to regulate or regulated unsatisfactorily. The growth of statutory employment rights through the post-war period reflects a political judgement that the common-law framework — premised on individual freedom of contract between formally equal parties — produced unjust outcomes when applied to the asymmetric power of the employment relationship (Lewis and Sargeant, 2023).

Secondary legislation — statutory instruments made under powers granted by primary legislation — fills out the detail. The Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999, the Part-Time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000, and the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 are examples of regulation-level law that implements broader statutory or supranational obligations. The advantage of secondary legislation is that it can be amended without primary legislative process; the disadvantage is that it can be amended without primary legislative process, allowing significant changes in worker protections to occur without full parliamentary scrutiny.

European Union law remained a major source until the UK’s withdrawal in 2020, and continues to influence UK employment law through the body of retained EU law and through the interpretive habit of UK tribunals. Foundational directives on equal pay, working time, agency workers, transfer of undertakings (TUPE), pregnant-worker protection and information and consultation were all implemented into UK law and remain in force. The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 created a framework for amending or removing retained EU law, generating ongoing political contest about which protections should be preserved, modified or abandoned (Cabrelli, 2024).

Codes of practice, particularly those issued by ACAS on disciplinary and grievance procedures and by the EHRC on the Equality Act, are not law but are admissible in tribunal proceedings. Failure to follow the ACAS Code on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures can result in adjustments of up to 25 per cent in tribunal compensation (ACAS, 2024). Their practical authority is therefore comparable to that of law itself.

The evolution of this body has been shaped by three principal forces. The first is the post-war legislative expansion of statutory rights, which reflected the development of trade-union influence, growing social expectations and the introduction of European obligations. The second is the partial retrenchment of those rights from the late 1970s onward — tribunal qualifying periods raised, fees introduced (and then quashed by the Supreme Court in R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51), redundancy thresholds amended. The third is the post-Brexit reconfiguration of European-derived rights, which remains in flux: the Employment Rights Bill 2024–25 introduces day-one unfair dismissal protections, expanded statutory sick pay, and stronger trade union rights, marking a notable shift back toward protection (UK Government, 2025). The current state of UK employment law therefore reflects competing political currents rather than a stable settlement, and HR practitioners need to read the legal landscape as dynamic rather than fixed.

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