Employment Rights Bill 2024
Introduced to Parliament on 10 October 2024, the Bill is the most significant employment-related legislation for decades.
Overview
The Employment Rights Bill is the main vehicle for implementing the Government’s pre-election promises in its Plan to Make Work Pay. Many of the measures will require regulations to flesh out the detail.
Roughly a third of the 158-page Bill is devoted to amending employment rights. If you expand the headings below you can find more information about these measures arranged by topic.
The rest of the Bill covers topics we’ll consider in future briefings, including significant amendments to trade union rights, a new framework for collective bargaining in some sectors and the creation of a single body to enforce core employment rights.
Not all the Government’s policy commitments have made it into the Bill. There are some notable omissions, including promises to introduce a right to switch off and to reform the complex rules about employment status. The Government will be consulting about these measures, but isn't ready to legislate yet.
It will take about a year for the Bill to complete its legislative journey through Parliament and for the relevant regulations to be published. That means that most of the measures are unlikely to take effect until 2026. The Government has already said that the changes to unfair dismissal legislation won’t come into force before Autumn 2026.
What’s in the Bill?
The Bill abolishes the two-year qualifying period for unfair dismissal, but introduces a new framework for a lighter touch unfair dismissal regime during an “initial period of employment”. In previous Government statements, this has been described as an exception for probationary periods, though it might turn out to be wider than that.
Employees must have started work to benefit from the ‘Day 1 right’. Existing provisions on automatically unfair dismissals will be retained.
In order to come within this more relaxed regime during the initial period of employment, an employer will need to demonstrate a potentially fair reason for dismissal which relates to the individual employee. That means that dismissals on redundancy grounds during the initial period of employment will not fall within this new regime.
What will follow in secondary legislation?
Regulations will define the length of the initial period of employment and how it is calculated. This is likely to be a minimum of six months and could be as long as a year. The Government currently supports a compromise of nine months.
The regulations may also specify that the dismissal will be regarded as fair if certain procedural steps have been followed.
What’s in the Bill?
Currently the numerical threshold for triggering collective consultation requirements is calculated per “establishment”. The Bill will amend the relevant legislation so that counting proposed redundancies for this purpose will be done across the employer’s entire business, even if it's operating from multiple locations.
What’s in the Bill?
It will become automatically unfair to dismiss an employee for not agreeing to a variation to their contract, or if the employer dismisses the employee to replace, or to re-engage them on varied contractual terms. There is an exception if the employer can show that it was in financial difficulties and needed to re-structure to remain viable.
Even if the dismissal is not automatically unfair, the tribunal will still need to consider whether the dismissal was fair under the normal rules, taking account a non-exhaustive list of factors set out in the Bill. These include whether any consultation was carried out by the employer with the employee, an independent trade union or another employee representative organisation about the variation of the employee’s contract of employment, and whether the employer offered the employee anything in return for agreeing to a variation.
What will be in secondary legislation?
There is power to make regulations to specify other factors that must be taken into account when assessing the fairness of a dismissal in this context.
What’s in the Bill?
There are three groups of measures to protect zero-hours workers:
- The right to guaranteed hours after the end of every reference period, which reflects the hours worked during that period
- The right to reasonable notice of shifts (including change and cancellation)
- The right to payment for cancelled, moved and curtailed shifts where sufficient notice has not been given
Some of these rights also extend to workers where the total hours are guaranteed but the contract doesn't specify a fixed working pattern. The provisions in the Bill don't extend to agency workers.
Similar – but less extensive - provisions in the Workers (Predictable Terms and Conditions) Act 2023 (which have not been brought into effect) will be repealed.
What will follow in secondary legislation?
Regulations will define the reference period for guaranteed hours and other conditions of entitlement as well as the procedural requirements around the offer of a new contract. It's currently expected that the reference period will be fixed at 12 weeks.
In relation to reasonable notice of shifts, regulations will specify minimum notice periods.
In relation to the right to payment for cancelled shifts, regulations will specify the amount of notice required, the compensation due and when it must be paid.
There is also power in the Bill to make regulations to extend these provisions (suitably modified) to agency workers.
What’s in the Bill?
The Bill provides that an employer may only refuse a flexible working request if it considers that a specified ground applies and if it is reasonable to refuse the request on that ground. The specified grounds remain the same as in current legislation.
The Bill also adds a requirement to state the ground for refusing the application and explain why the employer considers that decision is reasonable.
What will be in secondary legislation?
Nothing – all the relevant provisions are in the Bill. However, the Bill introduces a new power to make regulations which specify the steps an employer must take when consulting with the employee before rejecting a claim. The requirement to consult was introduced in April 2024.
What’s in the Bill?
Key measures include:
- Removing the qualifying period for parental leave and paternity leave
- Introducing the ability to take paternity leave after shared parental leave
- Creating a new, broader right to bereavement leave which will replace parental bereavement leave
What will be in secondary legislation?
The qualifying relationships for bereavement leave will be specified in regulations.
The Bill will also create a new power to make regulations which will extend the current protection of pregnant women and new mothers from dismissal on redundancy grounds to dismissal for other reasons. Similar provision will be made for other kinds of statutory leave.
What’s in the Bill?
The three-day waiting period to qualify for statutory sick pay will be removed. This means that eligibility for SSP can arise where a person is incapable of work for a single day, as opposed to the current requirement for there to be 4 consecutive days of incapacity.
In addition, the Lower Earnings Limit will be removed. However, the Bill allows for lower earners to be paid less than the statutory rate.
What will be in secondary legislation?
Regulations will fix the maximum SSP for lower earners at a specified percentage of their normal weekly earnings.
What’s in the Bill?
The duty imposed on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their workers in the course of their employment will be strengthened by adding “all” before “reasonable”.
The Bill also inserts sexual harassment into the list of relevant failures for disclosures to qualify for protection under whistleblowing legislation.
Finally, the Bill re-introduces protection against third party harassment (of all kinds) into the Equality Act. An employer will be liable for third party harassment where an employee is harassed in the course of their employment, and it is shown that the employer failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent the third party from harassing them.
What will be in secondary legislation?
The Bill confers power to make regulations to specify steps which an employer must take and matters to which they must have regard to meet the obligation to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. The regulations may set out a non-exhaustive list of obligations that are to be regarded as “reasonable”.
What’s in the Bill?
The Bill will require employers which are subject to the gender pay gap reporting requirements to publish an equality action plan alongside the information they are already required to make public. This includes their plans to address the gender pay gap and to support employees going through the menopause.
What will be in secondary legislation?
Details of what will be required by way of an equality action plan will be set out in regulations.