The current Law Lords will be the first justices of the new 12-member Supreme Court, and will not be able to sit or vote in the House of Lords during their tenure. They will be able to return to the House of Lords as full members when they retire from the Supreme Court. However, anyone newly appointed to the Supreme Court will not have a seat in the House of Lords.

See the Parliament website to view the final House of Lords proceedings.

To view reports on 115 House of Lords decisions impacting on employment, visit the XpertHR case reports section. Notable House of Lords decisions for employers include:

• Polkey v AE Dayton Services Ltd, in which the House of Lords made clear that, except in exceptional circumstances, a failure to follow a fair dismissal procedure will normally result in a finding of unfair dismissal. Polkey may have been partially reversed during the lifetime of the ill-fated statutory dispute resolution procedures, but the law on unfair dismissal is now back to how it was prior to October 2004.
• London Borough of Lewisham v Malcolm, which, although a housing case, had major implications for the meaning of disability discrimination in relation to employment. The House of Lords disapproved Clark v TDG t/a Novacold on the correct comparator in disability-related discrimination cases. It held that the correct approach when considering if disability-related discrimination is established is to compare the treatment of the claimant with that of a non-disabled person who is otherwise in the same circumstances - in the Malcolm case, where a tenant with schizophrenia sublet his council flat, this was a tenant who was not similarly disabled who also sublet his flat.
• Majrowski v Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Trust, in which the House of Lords held that, under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, employers will be vicariously liable for harassment committed by employees acting in the course of their employment.
• Malik and another v Bank of Credit and Commerce International SA, where the House of Lords held that, in principle, employees can recover “stigma” damages in respect of their reasonably foreseeable loss of employment prospects resulting from their employer’s breach of the implied term of trust and confidence.
• St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council v Derbyshire and others, in which the House of Lords held that an employer that wrote to a number of equal pay litigants and their colleagues warning of potential job losses if they continued with their claims victimised them contrary to the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.