Employment Rights Bill

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

The King’s Speech on 17th July 2024 outlined a raft of legislative measures, among them an Employment Rights Bill. The briefing notes on the King’s Speech state that the Bill will include much of what the Labour Party outlined in its document called Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay (the Plan), which require primary legislation to implement.

Whether the Bill will include other of the Plan’s proposals will have to await publication of the Bill (promised within the first 100 days of Labour taking power). It's worth remembering that while the Bill may be introduced within the first 100 days, it will take longer to make its way through Parliament, so it's unlikely that we'll see these changes before 2025. 

Amongst the Bill’s measures outlined in the briefing notes are the following:

Zero-hours contracts

Exploitative zero-hours contracts will be outlawed and anti-avoidance measures introduced. Contracts will have to provide for several hours that are regularly worked as judged against a 12-week reference period.

Fire and rehire

Fire and rehire will not be ‘banned’, despite the rhetoric. Labour recognises that viable restructuring (where there is genuinely no alternative) is an important right for businesses if they are to survive and thrive. However, it proposes to ‘reform the law to provide effective remedies against abuse’ and also replace the current code of practice with a strengthened one.

Day 1 rights

The Bill will make unfair dismissal a Day 1 right, abolishing the current requirement for employees to have two years’ continuous service before they can claim that their employer has acted unreasonably in dismissing them. The Plan states that ‘this will not prevent fair dismissal, which includes dismissal for reasons of capability, conduct or redundancy, or probationary periods with fair and transparent rules and processes. We will ensure employers can operate probationary periods to assess new hires’. It’s unclear currently what this actually means. See also Abolishing the Qualifying Period for Unfair Dismissal by Darren Newman.

The right to sick pay and parental leave will also accrue on the first day of employment. The lower earnings limit and the 3-day waiting period for SSP will be removed.

Flexible working

The Bill will adapt and build on existing changes to flexible working rights to ensure flexibility is a genuine default. Might this perhaps suggest a move away from a right to request to a right which must be granted unless it is not reasonably feasible?

New mothers

The Bill will enhance redundancy protections relating to maternity so that any dismissal (not simply an offer of suitable alternative employment in a redundancy situation) is only allowed, in the six months after the woman returns to work, in specified circumstances.

Enforcement

The Bill will establish a Fair Work Agency to ensure greater coordination in the face of complex enforcement challenges. This body will have the powers it needs to undertake targeted and proactive enforcement work and bring civil proceedings upholding employment rights. The previous government prepared for this but ended up not doing anything.

Trade union law

The Bill will repeal 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

For an analysis of Labour’s proposals (as outlined in the Plan), see Darren Newman’s Labour’s Plans for Trade Union Law.

Race and disability

A separate Equality (Race and Disability) Bill will enshrine in law the full right to equal pay for ethnic minorities and disabled people, which the briefing note states will make it ‘much easier for them to bring unequal pay claims’. Some employment law experts have expressed doubt as to how straightforward this will be to do.

This Bill will also introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay reporting for employers with more than 250 employees.