In recent days, the Government has published its draft Employment Rights Bill. The Department for Business and Trade claims the Bill will ‘boost pay and productivity, showing the benefits of a ‘pro-business, pro-worker’ approach’. So, what do we have in store?

There’s a lot to digest

We cannot hope to summarise all 158 pages of the Bill in this brief article. But here are the headline points you definitely need to note:

1. Unfair Dismissal – the Bill intends to remove the 2-year qualifying period of service currently required to claim unfair dismissal. In theory, this means that from day one of employment, employees will be able to make an unfair dismissal claim. However, there is more to this than meets the eye. Read our more detailed article here.

2. ‘Fire and rehire’ – the Bill will make it automatically unfair to dismiss employees (i) for refusing to agree to changes to their contracts of employment or (ii) in order to replace them with someone else who does the same work but on different terms. The law may permit such dismissals in exceptional cases, where the survival of the business is at stake. However, the burden of proof will fall heavily on the employer.

3. ‘Zero hours contracts’ – those employed under ‘zero hours’ contracts (or contracts offering minimal working hours) will be entitled to be offered a contract that ‘guarantees’ them the hours they actually work. They will also be entitled to ‘reasonable notice’ of (i) the shifts they are requested or required to work and (ii) the variation or cancellation of any such shifts. 

4. Statutory Sick Pay – SSP will become payable from the first day of absence, rather than employees having to wait until the fourth working day. The government also intends to remove the ‘lower earnings limit’, which would mean that even the lowest paid workers are entitled to some SSP.

5. ‘Flexible working’ – many were expecting a significant expansion of flexible working rights. Presently, the changes look rather more modest. Employers will still be able to decline flexible working requests, but they may need to be clearer about the grounds for refusing and why it is reasonable to do so. Interestingly, no changes have been made to the compensation regime, which remains limited to 8 weeks’ pay.

6. Pregnancy rights – the Bill paves the way for further regulations aimed at extending the protection from dismissal by reason of redundancy afforded to women on maternity leave.

So what now?

Although the Bill sets out a wide variety of proposed changes to our employment laws, none of them are likely to come into force anytime soon. Instead, our current best guess is that detailed consultation will take place through 2025, with the possibility that some of these measures will begin to come into force towards the end of 2026. As is always the case, these time estimates could slip. 

Keep your eyes peeled for the outcome of the consultation exercise. We’ll be providing further updates as soon as we know more.