What impact will the Bribery Act 2010 have on your business?

The Bribery Act 2010 comes into force on 1st July 2011 and businesses should be taking steps to ensure that they have procedures in place to prevent bribery.

The Act aims to promote anti-bribery practices among businesses by introducing a corporate offence of failure to prevent bribery. This offence could occur as a result of the activities of a range of people working on behalf of the organisation – an employee, consultant or agent, for example – if those individuals were involved in accepting or receiving a bribe which resulted in the organisation gaining or retaining business. A business will have a defence if it can show that it had "adequate procedures" in place to prevent bribery - but what exactly are adequate procedures?

The key to this will depend on the bribery risks you face and many organisations will face little or no risk of bribery – in this case you may not feel the need for any procedures to prevent bribery. If however, once you have assessed your position there is considered to be a potential risk, then the procedures you adopt should be proportionate to that risk.

There are six key principles will help you decide if you need to do anything different;

The action you take should be proportionate to the risks you face and the size of the business.

There must be commitment from the top level of the business.

Assess the risks you might face - for example the markets you operate in, or the people you deal with.

Due diligence of knowing who you are dealing with.

Communication of your policies and procedures to your staff raising awareness of the issues.

As time goes on, it is important to have a monitoring and review period to ensure your procedures stay up to date.

The Ministry of Justice has published a quick start guide on the Bribery Act 2010 and how it affects businesses, this can be found at www.justice.gov.uk.

As a minimum, we recommend that businesses have an anti bribery policy statement which should form part of their Company policies and procedures or Employee Handbook.

If one of your employees requests to change their working hours, do you have to agree?

Certain employees have a statutory right to ask to change their working hours.

However, it is important to note that this right is a right to request flexible working and not a right to have it on demand.

This right is available to male or female employees who are the parent, guardian, adoptive parent or foster parent of a child under the age of 17 (under the age of 18 if the child is disabled), or they care for a dependant adult. The employee must have 26 weeks continuous service with you, and the request must be made in order that the employee may undertake their care activities.

There is no legal right for employees to be granted flexible working, however, employers are required to consider any such request and explain their reasons if they refuse.

If a request is received, then within 28 days you must either accept the change or arrange a meeting with the employee to discuss the application. The employee has the right to bring a fellow employee to this meeting. Within 14 days of the meeting you must then give your decision in writing.

You can refuse the request but only if it satisfies one or more of the following criteria; the burden of additional costs, a detrimental effect on the ability to meet customer demand, an inability to reorganise work among existing staff, the inability to recruit additional staff, a detrimental impact on quality or performance, insufficiency of work during the periods the employee proposes to work or planned structural changes.