The Compendium

Employment Rights Act 1996

The Employment Rights Act (ERA) consolidates enactments relating to employment rights. The ERA covers areas such as unfair dismissal, redundancy payments, protection of wages, zero hour contracts, Sunday working, suspension from work, flexible working and termination of employment.

[See ‘Redundancy’ and ‘Unfair Dismissal’.]

Enforcement Agent

An Enforcement Agent is someone who has a legal power to collect certain debts. They may do this taking and selling the belongings of a debtor to raise the money to pay a creditor or creditors. An Enforcement Agent can either be a court official, or someone employed by a private firm.

Enforcement Agents used to be called bailiffs (and the term is still used in practice). There are different types of ‘bailiff/enforcement agent’:

• ‘certificated enforcement agents’ (also known as ‘civil enforcement agents’). The term ‘bailiff’ is no longer particularly applicable in insolvency and restructuring now, as the relevant roles have been renamed;
• ‘high court enforcement officers’;
• ‘county court and family court bailiffs’;
• bailiffs who enforce magistrates’ court fines and warrants for arrests (either ‘civilian enforcement officers’ or ‘Approved Enforcement Agents’).

[See ‘High Court Enforcement Officer’, ‘Bailiff’, ‘HCEO’ and ‘Certificated Enforcement Agents’.)

Enterprise Act 2002

The Enterprise Act 2002 introduced a number of important reforms, some of them (in Part 10) with respect to corporate insolvency in the United Kingdom. It aimed to promote the rescue and rehabilitation of financially-troubled companies and give greater protection to the interests of the general body of creditors.

It introduced the modern day process and procedure of Administrations (rewriting the Insolvency Act 1986 by including Schedule B1 which sets out the law for that process) and ended Administrative Receiverships for any fixed and