The Equal Pay Act 1970 recently celebrated its 25th anniversary of implementation. It became law in 1975 with the first Sex Discrimination Act 1975. Last year the pay gap between men and women narrowed from, 20% to 19%, mainly due to the national minimum wage. [2000]Read More

The government is to launch a public awareness in 2000 of the dangers of buying counterfeit goods. In addition to the obvious disadvantages such as buying poor goods, having no consumer protection, and threatening legitimate businesses, the government wishes to stress that some counterfeit goods are dangerous, and much counterfeiting is used to fund international...Read More

The Electronic Communications Act 2000 received Royal Assent on 25 May 2000. The Act is intended to make electronic commerce much easier. The main provisions of the Act are: giving legal certainty to documents created and sent electronically; creating a framework for legally binding electronic signatures; and sweeping away requirements that documents must be in...Read More

The Trustee Bill, before parliament in 2000, will make the biggest changes to trustee law since 1925. There are six main parts to the bill. The first part imposes a duty of care on the trustees. A trustee must exercise such skill and care as is reasonable in the circumstances. This new provision includes pension...Read More

A case has relaxed the strict rule, established in 1902, that a director owes no fiduciary duty to individual shareholders but only to the whole company. Three brothers were shareholders in a BMW dealership. Keith held ordinary shares and ran the business. The other two brothers held redeemable preference shares. By 1992, Keith was the...Read More

A creditor of an insolvency company successfully brought a private prosecution against a company director for failure to lay accounts before a meeting as required by Companies Act 1985 s242. The director was fined £75 at Cardiff magistrates court and was ordered to pay £600 costs. This case establishes no legal precedent, as it is...Read More

The government announced  in 2000 a package of measures and targets to achieve much higher levels of recycling waste. Recycling includes composting. At present, local authorities recycle about 8% of waste. The new targets are 17% by 2003, 25% by 2005, 30% by 2010 and 35% by 2015. The UK is committed to custing landfill...Read More

The government is conducting a fundamental review into National Savings, it was announced in 2000. The review includes whether National Savings have any role at all now that other forms of secure financial products are readily available and the demand for government borrowing has reduced. National Savings were established in 1861 for the dual purpose...Read More

Boo.com became the first high profile dot.com company to crash when it went into liquidation in 2000 having lost over £100 million raised at flotation. The company sold branded sportswear on the Internet. The technology-heavy Nasdaq index is now 37% below its peak on 10 March. The techMARK index, which tracks dot.com shares, has lost...Read More

The London Stock Exchange is considering offering financial help to small stockbrokers to help them cope with the consequences of the proposed merger with Deutsche Borse, it announced in 2000. Stockbrokers face a bill of up to £40 million for replacing the existing SETS software with the German Xetra system if the merger proceeds. Small...Read More