While many of us spent Valentine’s Day gazing around the workplace looking for romance, nearly a third of UK employers claim they have ‘prohibited’ relationships between managers and subordinates, according to Personnel Today, which has based the claim on the 2012 HRXpert survey results to be published next month.

It’s a tangled issue, with the Trades Union Congress weighing in to remind UK businesses that relationship ‘bans’, USA style, are not legal in this country, where rights to association and privacy issues are enshrined in the adoption of the 1998 Human Rights Act. It is acceptable to develop HR policy which might include clothing rules that, for example, prohibit non-professional garments (short skirts, halter tops and open toed sandals for women, unbuttoned shirts or even shorts, for men) but such prohibitions would have to balance gender equality too – you can’t ban shorts for men and allow women to wear short skirts, and you can’t stop women wearing camisole tops and allow men to wear vest-type T-shirts as such rulings could be considered sexist.

The most that UK law currently allows is that an employer can require employees to behave professionally (which includes clothing worn to work) in the workplace. Any employee who felt they had been held to account for a workplace relationship on the grounds of a ban, rather than on the basis of their having behaved unprofessionally, could in theory take their case to an industrial tribunal. The idea banning relationships with subordinates is particularly vexed, as it appears to allow for some forms of workplace relationship and not others, which is clearly discriminatory.

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