In profile: Peter Woodhouse, Partner, Head of Business Sector and Employment Team, Stone King LLP

Widely regarded as a specialist and a leader in both employment and transport law, he often acts for logistics businesses on a range of legal issues, from challenging legislative amendments on tachographs to bridge strikes.

FROM BARRISTER TO TRANSPORT SPECIALIST

A barrister by training, Woodhouse was called to Gray’s Inn 30 years ago, and after spending a few years at the bar was offered a job as an in-house counsel by one of the firms of solicitors that was instructing him.

Following a stint doing general corporate work and litigation, he then began specialising in employment law. Before long he was offered an opportunity at Cartwright solicitors, at the time one of the leading firms of transport solicitors.

“The outgoing senior partner was an employment lawyer, a transport lawyer and an advocate and was trying to recruit a replacement,” Woodhouse explained, “I was two of those three things, I was an employment lawyer and an advocate, and he said he could teach me transport, and so I moved to Bristol to work with him.”

Cartwrights solicitors later merged with a larger firm and in due course Woodhouse left to join his present employer Stone King LLP. “I brought a goodly chunk of the transport practice with me, including my contacts with Logistics UK,” he said, “so I now do a mix of transport law with employment law, with a heavy focus on the advocacy side. So, lots of employment tribunals and public inquiries.”

WISE COUNSEL ON FREIGHT COUNCIL

Woodhouse has been a member of Logistics UK’s South West Regional Freight Council, ever since he started practising transport law in Bristol in the late 1990s.

Initially he was just one of the members of the council, but as by his own admission he “tends to be fairly vocal”, his communication skills were soon noticed and appreciated by the other members of the council. “I think one of my skill sets is not just listening but then summarising what people have said succinctly,” he said.

Having initially acted as vice chair, people liked his style so when he said he was willing to stand as chair in 2009 nobody stood against him. “At the end of each term, I make it clear I would not be offended if they'd had enough of me and someone else wanted to be chair – if they did I probably wouldn't stand again – but the arrangements seem to suit everyone and nobody has stood against me since I started,” he said.

Woodhouse regards his role as chair of the council as a symbiotic one, where he can offer legal insights, while the issues discussed also inform his legal work: “I very much enjoy working with them and it sounds like they appreciate my approach. I get things done.”

Logistics UK wants and needs to understand the views of its members, which can be quite a challenge if you have 30 in a room.

“What people appreciate from me,” he said, “is the ability to listen to 30 delegates and then coalesce that into three or four sound bites that they can jot down and take back. And if you do that all with a sense of humour, finish on time, then it’s all fun.”

TACKLING A BREADTH OF ISSUES

In more than two decades on the South West Regional Freight Council, Woodhouse has chaired discussions and debates on a broad range of local and national issues.

The Bath Clean Air Zone and the tunnel under Stonehenge, which High Court decisions have thrown into disarray in recent days, are examples of local issues currently under discussion. The national issues include the shortage of drivers, the inability to secure MOT slots and driver training.

Guest speakers are also frequently invited, including Traffic Commissioner Kevin Rooney, who Woodhouse said frequently delivers “entertaining and often quite acerbic” presentations, most recently on bridge strikes.

While Woodhouse readily admits that he cannot compete with a CPC-qualified transport manager on topics like drivers’ hours, he believes he can make a different sort of contribution to discussions.

“What I can and do offer,” he said, “is insights into the way a Traffic Commissioner deals with matters, what is likely to come to a Public Inquiry, what isn’t, and then also general legal views about how statutes and statutory instruments can be interpreted.”

BRIEFING TO HIGHLIGHT EMPLOYMENT LAW ISSUES

Woodhouse and his colleagues at Stone King LLP are the expert speakers for a forthcoming Logistics UK member briefing – Employment and Law – to be held on Tuesday 7 September 2021.

To begin with, this was to focus on off-payroll issues, but since receiving questions from Logistics UK members, Woodhouse decided to broaden it out to more topical issues, including the right to work and employee monitoring issues arising from truck web cams and site CCTV recordings.

“I thought information law is topical and it appears to be of interest to Logistics UK members, so I think that’s going to be an essential part of it,” he said. This section of the briefing will be presented by his colleague Anna Rawlinson, who is a specialist on information law. “Bear in mind that the cab is a workplace,” he said, “so that will bring in the information issues about cab recordings.”

The broad theme of the briefing will be workplace issues, to cover three topics: off-payroll working and what the penalties are for non-compliance, information law and right to work checks.

A FRESH QUESTION AND ANSWER FORMAT

With many in the business having endured 18 months or more of PowerPoint presentations via videoconferencing, Woodhouse is keen that his briefing adopts a different format, to help attendees apply their learnings in a workplace environment.

“What I don’t want and what I will not do is a learned treatise on legal issues,” he said, “We will do a very practical seminar on what you can do here to enable you to do that. So, for example, if you have a recording of a driver driving with one hand on the wheel, can you use that recording as evidence in a disciplinary hearing? That is much more help to an operator than an abstract analysis of Article 28 of the EU GDPR.”

Given his barrister training, Woodhouse is keen to adopt a more conversational question and answer format for the Employment Law member briefing.

“I would find it desperately dull listening to three or four lawyers all talking to PowerPoint for an hour and a half,” he said, “So the structure that I have adopted is a kind of Q and A. I act as chair and we have a number of delegates and I know the questions in advance usually. I work through those Q and As with delegates, so it’s much more human.”

LEGAL MATTERS AHEAD

When reviewing legal matters on the near horizon for the logistics sector, Woodhouse said that the devastation caused by driver shortages and the decarbonisation of transport rank among the two big challenges ahead.

On the skills and headcount shortage issue, he said the recent “ping-demic” was exacerbating the shortage of drivers: “It will rebalance to some extent because the government is going to have to rebalance it, but the government can have a new trial and release people back to the market. However, if the general public does not want a relaxed market there’s going to be a political backlash and a lack of political will to allow people back to the market to work, so it’s not going to be as straightforward as it should be.

“Then of course we’ve got Brexit and with the limited numbers of foreign workers now allowed into the country, people are desperate for non-skilled labour. That’s the biggest challenge.”

The next big issue he believes the logistics sector will need to grapple with is the electrification of vehicles and climate change. “I’m by no means an expert on the technology of it,” he said, “but the infrastructure is not there. The political will to change it is there but the political will is ahead of the infrastructure.”

Peter Woodhouse will be speaking at the Employment and Law member briefing on Tuesday 7 September 2021. Free to attend for all Logistics UK members, it will take place between 3pm and 4.30pm.

*www.logistics.org.uk/memberbriefings21

Published On: 05/08/2021 16:00:50

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