A bartender on Collingwood Street who is groped by a customer and told by the manager to get on with it has a stronger case than she would have had two years ago. Employers have been under a duty since October 2024 to take preventive steps against sexual harassment, including by customers, and in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city that lives partly on its Saturday nights, that duty reaches every bar, club and restaurant from the Bigg Market to Osborne Road. Tribunals can now increase compensation where the employer did nothing to prevent it.
Hospitality is only part of it. Newcastle's largest workplaces are the hospitals, the universities, the city council and the civil service, and their cases have a shape of their own: long sickness absences and capability dismissals, disability discrimination, whistleblowing by clinicians, grievances that have run three stages before a solicitor sees them. The universities add fixed-term research contracts and redundancy rounds, the software firms and call centres add restrictive covenants, and the subsea yards on the river add TUPE transfers whenever a contract changes hands.
Claims from all of them go to the employment tribunal at the Civil and Family Courts and Tribunals Centre on Barras Bridge, which hears cases from the whole of the North East. The deadline is short: three months less one day from the dismissal, or the act complained of, to notify Acas for early conciliation. Settlement agreements need a certificate from an independent adviser, which the employer normally funds.
A first conversation is often free, settlement agreement advice is usually fixed-fee, and a contested claim is charged hourly, in stages or occasionally on a no win, no fee basis. Household insurance sometimes includes legal expenses cover.
Employment firms serving Newcastle are listed below, verified first and then by distance. Read what employment law covers and the general employment law solicitors guide; employers should see business law solicitors in Newcastle, and car plant workers have their own Sunderland page.
