Biggest Shakeup in Employment Law in 30 Years: What You Need To Know

October 15, 2024

By Owen John

From reviewing the Employment Rights Bill (it runs to 158 pages long!), a better picture has emerged of the significant employment law changes that lie in store for us over the next few years. One thing we don’t know for sure however is when all these changes will come into force.

There are rumours of an October 2026 commencement date but those are just rumours at this stage. We’ll keep you updated when we know for sure.

We’ll be holding free 45-minute webinars to explain what’s changing on 13 November (English webinar) and 14 November (Welsh webinar). Booking details here.

The Bill introduces 28 employment law changes. However, I’ve summarised the most important changes below:

1. A day-1 right not to be unfairly dismissed. Currently, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal is 2 years, so this is a big change! We’ve covered this topic in more detail here. There will now be a consultation on the concept of a statutory probationary period (with the idea being that an employer will still be able to dismiss an employee fairly within a set probationary period). There is a rumour that this statutory probationary period will be 9 months – but again this is just a rumour at this stage.
2. An end to “fire and re-hire”. This is another big one! The Bill will make it automatically unfair to dismiss an employee who refuses a variation in their contract. This goes further than many of us expected. There will be a very limited exception however – where an employer can show that they are in seriously dire financial straits.
3. Ending “exploitative” zero-hour contracts. This one gets very complicated! In simple terms, a zero-hours worker will have a right to a guaranteed hours contract which reflects the actual hours that they work over a reference period. We are awaiting more clarity on what the reference period will be, but it’s currently proposed as 12 weeks.
4. Duty to prevent sexual harassment. We recently covered here the new duty which comes in on 26 October for employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment in their workforces. However, the Bill extends this by saying that employers will now need to take “all” reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. This one extra little word extends the duty significantly. In addition, the Bill also further extends the new duty to cover the conduct of third parties; meaning that employers can be liable if their employees are sexually harassed by say a customer, client, supplier or any other third party.
5. Flexible working. This change doesn’t actually go as far as many were predicting (you may have seen some papers predicting a “right to a 4-day week”!) The Bill, in fact, does nothing of the sort. In reality, the Bill will mean that employers need to give better, clearer reasons if they want to turn down flexible working requests. For more detail on what the current laws are on flexible working requests, we’ve covered that here.
6. Statutory sick pay. This will become payable to an employee on the first day of their absence; doing away with the current need for them to serve 3 ‘waiting days’ before SSP becomes payable and will also apply to all workers, not just those who earn over a certain amount.
7. Bereavement leave. The Bill effectively removes the word ‘parental’ from the existing rights to parental bereavement leave; meaning that statutory bereavement leave will be available to a much broader range of people (and not just limited to bereaved parents). We await more clarity on this however.
8. Employment contracts. All employment contracts will need to have a statement in them saying that employees have the right to join a trade union.

There are other changes (such as those relating to trade unions and strike action, the possible need for employers with over 250 employees to report on their ethnicity and disability gap, and the establishment of a new Fair Work Agency to police employment rights). We will cover these in more detail as we get it during the course of the next few months.

For more information on this topic, contact our employment solicitor Owen John on ojohn@darwingray.com or 02920 829 118.