The Employment Rights Bill has been described as “the biggest upgrade of workers’ rights in a generation”.
Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear from our Head of Legal, Stefan Mars, on what’s changing, what’s been left out, when we can expect more detail, and what you can do to prepare.
Here are Stefan’s thoughts…
Labour left it to the 11th hour to publish their hotly anticipated Employment Rights Bill (day 98 of their 100-day promise!). The changes are certainly significant, but there have also been some key omissions which I suspect are partly due to the self-imposed 100-day deadline.
I’ve outlined the 10 key changes that have remained below, then in my next update, we’ll look at those that have been left out and what’s next for those omissions.
The changes…
1. Day one right to unfair dismissal – the current two years’ service required to bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim will be scrapped so that unfair dismissal instead becomes a day one right.
2. Day one right to SSP – removing the waiting days for statutory sick pay so employees will be entitled to SSP from day one, rather than having three waiting days and only getting SSP from the fourth day onwards.
3. Stronger laws against harassment – from 26 October, employers will have a duty to take ‘reasonable steps’ to prevent sexual harassment at work. The plan is to extend this by stretching the duty so employers have to take “all” reasonable steps.
4. Boosting union rights – changes designed to make it easier for trade unions to gain access to workplaces, secure statutory recognition and take industrial action in the event of a dispute.
5. Zero-hours contracts – these new rules are complex, but in short employers will have to offer guaranteed hours to those on zero-hours or low-hours contracts. The rules currently don’t apply to agency workers but the government has reserved the right to introduce similar legislation covering them.
6. Changes to collective redundancies triggers – the Bill removes references to “at one establishment” which has a knock-on effect that employers instead need to count redundancies across their whole business, meaning that more redundancies are likely to meet the 20+ trigger.
7. Fire and re-hire and changing Ts&Cs reforms – it will become automatically unfair to dismiss an employee for refusing to agree to a change in terms, or to replace them with another employee on different terms to carry out substantially the same role (other than in very limited circumstances).
8. Gender pay gap reporting action plans – a requirement for employers to publish action plans for closing their gender pay gaps.
9. Day one family rights – the Bill removes the existing service requirements for paternity and parental leave, making these into day one rights. There will also be a new right to at least one week’s bereavement leave.
10. New state enforcement agency – likely to be called the Fair Work Agency and will combine various bodies (such as HMRC’s National Minimum Wage Enforcement Team) as a step towards more state enforcement of employment rights.
Click here to download our Executive Summary and Checklist on these changes. In my next update, I’ll explain what’s been left out of the Employment Rights Bill, and then dive into each of the above changes in more detail.
Any questions please don’t hesitate to drop me a line here (or chat with your Halborns’ key lawyer).
