Employment Rights Bill

An Employment Rights Bill will radically transform the HR and employment law landscape.

The Bill, published on 10 October 2024, contains various measures covering individual and collective employment law rights. Implementation of the Bill will be approached in phases, involving some consultations, the use of secondary legislation and, in some cases, codes of practice. Consultations will start in 2025 with most of the reforms taking effect no earlier than 2026. Reforms of unfair dismissal will take effect no sooner than autumn 2026. A minority of Bill’s changes are expected to be introduced more quickly, including repealing some industrial action regulation.

Many, but not all, of the Bill’s measures were set out in Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay. Those that didn’t make it into the Bill (see Next Steps to Make Work Pay) include:

• a ‘right to switch off’, preventing employees from being contacted out of hours, except in exceptional circumstances
• a requirement for large employers to report their ethnicity and disability pay gap
• moving towards a single status of worker, and
• reviews of the parental leave and carers leave systems

The headline provisions in the Bill are listed below - with links to where we've included further analysis.

New individual employment rights

Included in the Bill are the following:

• ending ‘exploitative zero hours contracts - read more
• ending ‘fire and rehire’ - read more
• removing the two-year qualifying period for protections from unfair dismissal and a statutory probationary period during which a light touch dismissal process will apply - read more
• granting entitlement to SSP from the first day of illness, rather than the fourth day and removing the lower earnings limit for SSP
• granting Day 1 rights to paternity leave, unpaid parental leave and unpaid bereavement leave
• making flexible working the default for all, unless the employer can prove it’s unreasonable - read more
• strengthening protections against dismissal for pregnant women and new mothers
• increasing protections from sexual harassment, including third-party harassment - read more
• establishing a Fair Work Agency to undertake enforcement work and bring civil proceedings upholding employment rights

New collective employment rights

The Bill repeals much of the Conservative Party’s trade union laws, including the Trade Union Act 2016 and the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023. Amongst other things, the Bill will:

• allow union ballots to use modern technology rather than just the post
• union recognition procedures will be simplified
• unions will be able to call for recognition in the gig economy and platform employment sectors
• a duty on employers to inform workers of their right to join a union on a regular basis will be introduced, and
• blacklisting protections will be updated so that third-party contractors are not used to circumvent protections
• giving workers protection from detriment for participating in lawful strike action

In addition, the threshold for the statutory requirement to consult collectively will apply to those dismissed across the employer’s organisation; it will no longer be limited to employees at the establishment in question.