Employment Rights Bill 10 Oct 2024
The Government has published the Employment Rights Bill, promising this will be the biggest overhaul in workers’ rights in a generation. It will have far-reaching implications for all employers. However, this is a draft bill and it may be subject to amendments as it goes through Parliament. It may not come into force until Autumn 2026. Some measures have already been announced, such as changing the Low Pay Commission’s remit to consider the cost of living for the first time.
Other measures in the Bill include:
- Powers to create a Fair Pay Agreement in the adult social care sector are being introduced.
- Reinstating the School Support Staff Negotiating Body.
- Reinstating and strengthening the two-tier code for public sector contracts, ensuring that employees working on outsourced contracts will be offered terms and conditions no less favourable to those transferred from the public sector.
- Paying Statutory Sick Pay from the first day of absence rather than the fourth, and removing the lower earnings limit to make it available to all employees
- Bringing together the various agencies and bodies that enforce employment rights into a new Fair Work Agency, described as a simplified and strengthened system to protect workers and ensure justice in the workplace.
- Strengthening the rights of trade union representatives and bringing “archaic and prohibitive” trade union legislation into the 21st century.
- Multiple measures will be brought forward to protect workers from dismissal and blacklisting for trade union activity, ensure workers understand their right to join a trade union, to simplify the statutory recognition process, and bring in a new right of access for union officials to meet, represent, recruit and organize members in workplaces.
- The Bill will repeal the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 and the Trade Union Act 2016.
- Increase the likelihood of a request for flexible working arrangements to be granted, making it harder for employers to refuse requests for flexible working.
- Introduce day one entitlement to paternity leave and unpaid parental leave
- Introduce a statutory entitlement to bereavement leave, extending the class of eligible employees.
- Require large employers (over 250 employees) to produce equality action plans on how to address gender pay gaps and support employees through menopause, as well as strengthen rights for pregnant workers and new mothers.
- Day one protection from unfair dismissal, while allowing employers to operate probation periods. Removal of the two-year qualifying period to claim unfair dismissal, subject to probationary periods (details about this to follow from the government in due course).
- Increasing protection from sexual harassment in the workplace, by extending the definition of whistleblowing to include sexual harassment.
- End fire and rehire practices by severely limiting the ability to dismiss and re-engage to force through changes to employment contracts.
- Strengthening rights and requirements for collective redundancy consultation and widening the scope of the rules.
- Restrictions on the use of zero-hours contracts.
Other measures, such as the right to switch off to stop employers from contacting staff out of hours, are included in a next steps document for future discussion and consultation.
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