Vicarious liability for remote Christmas parties

Festivities will be very different this year. Despite exiting a national Lockdown this week, 98.7% of the population in England find themselves in tiers 2 or 3 in the run up to Christmas. As such, meeting indoors with anyone outside your household is forbidden. It looks like for the majority, a work Christmas party can only take place remotely, or limited to 6 people outside.

With this in mind, we wanted to warn employers about vicarious liability surrounding Christmas parties and work events; even for those taking place via zoom.

The well-established Court of Appeal case of Bellman v Northampton Recruitment Ltd [2018] held that an employer could be vicariously liable for acts carried out by employee’s ‘in the course of employment’.

In this case, a manager severely injured a college at an unscheduled drinking session that occurred following the Christmas party. Whilst court held that the unscheduled drinking session was not necessarily a seamless extension of the company’s Christmas party, the attack happened after a discussion about business matters which the manager’s decision-making had been challenged by the victim.