• 16 Oct 2024
• •
• 3 min read

Employment Alert – Employment Rights Bill

What’s happening?

The Employment Rights Bill was published on 10 October 2024. The commencement date for this legislation is still unknown but consultations are expected to take place in 2025 and most of the provisions will likely come into force in October 2026. So, this update is really to let you know what is mentioned in the Bill rather than an immediate call to action!

The key provisions are summarised below:

• Unfair Dismissal as a ‘Right from Day One’ – The qualifying period of two years will be removed. There is to be a consultation on a new probationary period or “initial period” – expected to be between 6 – 9 months.

• Ending Fire and Rehire – It will be automatically unfair to dismiss an employee for refusing a contract variation. This will be the case unless an employer can show that the variation is needed because its absence affects the employer’s ability to carry on the business as a going concern and the employer could not have reasonably avoided this.
• Trade Unions – the thresholds for Trade Union recognition will reduce meaning more businesses are likely to become unionised. Employers will also be required to give unions access to their workplaces for the purposes of meeting, recruiting or organising workers or facilitating collective bargaining.
• Ending exploitative Zero Hours Contracts – An employer will be required to offer their worker a ‘guaranteed hours contract if a worker is working under a zero-hour contract.’ There are limits and exceptions to this that an employer can rely on.
• Shift Workers – Workers will have a right to reasonable notice of shifts or changes to a shift. It also gives the right to pay (amount to be decided) if the shift is cancelled, moved or curtailed at short notice.
• Protection from Sexual Harassment – From 26 October 2024, employers will be required to take ‘reasonable’ steps to prevent harassment of their staff in the course of their employment, including from third parties. The Bill proposes to take this further and require ‘all reasonable steps’ and it will specify what some of these will be.
• Flexible Working – Employers need to state the grounds of refusing the application (as they do now) but moving forward, they will also be required to explain why they consider it reasonable to refuse the application.
• Paternity, Parental and Bereavement Leave – Paternity Leave and Parental Leave will be Day One rights. Bereavement Leave seems to be extended to anyone who is bereaved with the right to two weeks off in the case of a deceased child and one week for any other person.
• Statutory Sick Pay – SSP will now be paid from the first day of sickness and the lower earnings threshold for SSP will be removed.
• Gender Pay Gap/ Menopause – Employers with over 250 employees will have to have action plans on gender pay reporting and supporting employees through menopause.
• Collective Redundancy Consultation – When deciding whether there are 20 or more proposed redundancies, the number of redundancies across the whole business should be considered and multiple establishments should not be considered separately.
• Written Statement of Particulars of Employment – once the Bill is enacted section 1 statements will have to include a written statement that the worker has the right to join a trade union. The exact details will come later.

 
Employers will also be required to provide ‘justification notices’ confirming why they have taken a certain course of action in certain situations – (e.g. refused a flexible working request or a ‘guaranteed hours’ contract). The legal status of this is unclear but, in practice, it will significantly curtail an employer’s scope to retrofit the justification for their actions. In other words, it will limit an employer’s ability to deploy a clever argument in the face of a claim, and with the benefit of legal advice, if such argument was not made clear in the notice and at the time! We await details on this but it could have significant consequences on how employee requests are dealt with in future.

Why is this important?

To be fair, it isn’t yet. None of this is in force and we don’t know exactly when they will be. Also, we are not entirely clear what penalties employers will face if they breach these rules – which is key.

What should you do?

Stay Tuned: Keep an eye out for more of our Legal Updates that will be published over the next week with more detail on each of the reforms listed above. Trethowans are holding a free webinar on Tuesday 5 November designed to highlight the key changes. Please click the below link to sign up to attend this webinar.

Advice: If you require advice relating to the new bill, please contact [email protected] who will put you in touch with someone from our Trethowans Employment Team.