Employee duties and restrictions on competition

This overview outlines the Practice Notes in the subtopic 'Employee duties and restrictions on competition'.

All employees are under a duty of fidelity to their employer, which is also known as the duty of good faith, or of loyalty.

Fidelity is a broad concept containing a number of more specific duties, some of which overlap both with each other and with the duty of trust and confidence:

•
to behave honestly
•
not to work in competition
•
not to make a secret profit
•
to disclose information
•
not to misuse confidential information

Some employees will also owe additional, more onerous duties as a result of their being a fiduciary, or being a fiduciary in respect of some part of their duties. These may include:

•
a duty to act in the best interests of the employer, ie to act selflessly and with undivided loyalty, which in turn comprises:
1. ◦
  the duty to account for all property and profits made from the employee’s position as a fiduciary (the ‘no profits’ rule)
2. ◦
  the duty not to let their own interest and that

To view the latest version of this document and thousands of others like it, sign-in with LexisNexis or register for a free trial.

TAKE A FREE TRIAL

Latest Employment News

DBT updates Codes of Practice on industrial action ballots and notice to employers and picketing

The Department of Business and Trade (DBT) has published updated versions of the Code of Practice on Industrial Action Ballots and Notice to Employers and the Code of Practice on Picketing. The revisions reflect changes introduced by the Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA 2025), which came into force on 18 February 2026. These changes include the removal of provisions on picketing supervision, the abolition of the 50% turnout threshold for ballots and amendments to the notice requirements for industrial action ballots.

Office for Equality and Opportunity publishes equality action plan guidance and recommended actions

The Office for Equality and Opportunity has published guidance on equality action plans as well as a list of evidence-informed actions across various business objectives which may be included in the action plans. The Employment Rights Act 2025 introduces a new requirement on larger employers (250 or more employees, or public authorities) to publish an equality action plan alongside their gender pay gap data showing the steps adopted with regard to matters related to gender equality in their workforce. The requirement is set to be introduced on a voluntary basis from 6 April 2026 but will become mandatory from spring 2027. The guidance and the list of actions are designed to assist those employers who wish to implement the action plans in getting started.

Employment weekly highlights—5 March 2026

This edition of Employment weekly highlights includes: (1) consultations on protection from detriments for taking industrial action and the threshold for triggering collective redundancy obligations, (2) a response to the government’s consultation on unpaid internships, (3) an EAT case examining the respective weight to be given to individual and group disadvantage in indirect discrimination claims, (4) an EAT decision setting out guidance for employment judges dealing with reconsideration applications, (5) an EAT decision to grant a restriction of proceedings order against a vexatious litigant with over 50 claims, (6) a new Practice Note on bereaved partner’s paternity leave (BPPL), a new Precedent Solicitor apprenticeship agreement and an update to our paternity leave policy in relation to BPPL, (7) upcoming dates for your diary, and (8) other news items of interest to employment practitioners.

Data by any other name—Court of Appeal reverses Upper Tribunal’s ruling on the protection of ‘personal data’ (DSG v ICO)

Information Law analysis: In this case, the Court of Appeal unanimously allowed the appeal brought by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), holding that it is sufficient that data which has been subjected to unauthorised or unlawful processing by a third party still constitutes personal data from the perspective of the data controller, even if it is pseudonymised ‘in the hands of’ the data controller and therefore anonymised ‘in the hands of’ the attacker. Accordingly, the court held, the data controller is required to take ‘appropriate technical and organisational measures’ (ATOMs) to protect that personal data against such hackers, even where those third parties cannot themselves identify the individuals to whom the data relates. Even though this judgment is under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA 1998), this decision is significant as it confirms, in terms equally applicable to the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation, Assimilated Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (UK GDPR), that the scope of the security obligation is not diminished merely because stolen or exfiltrated data would be anonymised in the hands of the third party with unlawful access. This development expands and makes more pressing the obligation on controllers to assess and guard against a broader range of threats—including ransomware, data destruction, and bulk exfiltration, regardless of the attacker's capacity to re-identify data subjects. Written by Adelaide Lopez, senior associate at Wiggin LLP.