The new Employment Rights Bill is published

One of the Labour Party’s key manifesto pledges was to make sweeping changes to rights at work and to “Make Work Pay”. They asserted that the changes would be published within 100 days, and today, 98 days into their first 100 days, the Employment Rights Bill has been published.

Much of the detail of the legislation is as expected from the manifesto, but the particularities and the question of when it will be implemented, are still outstanding. Many reports suggest that due to the time involved in consulting and implementing the significant changes, they are unlikely to be in force before Autumn 2026.

The key provisions are:

• unfair dismissal protection to become a day one right with the removal of the qualifying period although subject to a probationary period the length of which is still to be determined through consultation;

• another very significant change is in relation to variation of contract exercises, or “fire and re-hire” practices – under the new Bill it will be an unfair dismissal if the employer seeks to vary the contract of employment without the employee’s agreement to do so;

• significant changes to the rights of zero-hours workers and workers generally, including rights for qualifying workers to be offered guaranteed hours, rights to reasonable notice for shifts and rights to payments for cancelled, moved or curtailed shifts at short notice;

• with regards to the right to request flexible working, employers will now have to explain why any refusal of an application is reasonable based on one of the specified grounds;

• statutory sick pay will be payable from the first day of absence (removing the “waiting days”);

• “parental” will be removed from “parental bereavement leave” so that anyone is entitled to bereavement leave;

• the qualifying period is to be removed for employees to be entitled to take paternity or parental leave;

• the new preventative duty in respect of taking reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, in force later this month, will be amended so that employers will have to take all reasonable steps;

• an obligation on employers to not permit a third party to harass any employee in the course of their employment;

• collective redundancy consultation requirements to consider whether 20 or more employees are affected across the whole business and not just at one establishment;

• plans for equality action plans for employers with over 250 employees;

• changes to collective rights and the creation of a new labour enforcement agency.

The Bill also contains some notable gaps on some of the things that were expected, including the “right to switch off” which aimed to prevent employees from being contacted out of hours, a move to reporting ethnicity and disability pay gaps and an attempt to create a single status of worker rather than the current three-tier employee/worker/self-employed system.

We will continue to monitor the Employment Rights Bill as it progresses and update you when further specifics are known. If you have any questions about how this might affect your business, please contact the Employment Team.

Contact our employment law solicitors today

We will keep you updated as things progress within the new government. If you have any questions regarding any of the issues raised in this article, please do not hesitate to contact our specialist Employment Law team by using our online enquiry form or by calling 0330 191 5713.