The Employment Rights Bill might have been described as “the biggest upgrade of workers’ rights in a generation”, but there were several key omissions.
Our Head of Legal, Stefan Mars, explains what’s been left out…
Labour’s self-imposed 100-day deadline to introduce the Employment Rights Bill has resulted in not everything originally promised actually making it into the Bill. Some measures have been dropped entirely, while others have been pared back and need consultation.
Below are the key elements that have been left out:
1. Right to disconnect – the right to ‘switch off from work’ and restrict how employers can contact employees ‘out of hours’ made plenty of headlines, but the government now plans to create a new statutory Code of Practice (after further consultation) to outline how this will work in practice. We expect the consultation to start in 2025.
2. Single worker status – the government’s Next Steps document makes clear that they will start consulting with a view to eventually abolishing the distinction between workers and employees, moving towards a single worker status.
3. Extension of the equal pay regime – the proposal was to extend equal pay requirements to cover race and disability. The Next Steps document confirms that this is still the intention (and to introduce mandatory reporting requirements as well), but we await further details.
Click here to download our Executive Summary and Checklist covering the Employment Rights Bill, and we’ll update you further when we know more about how the above omissions will progress.
Any questions please don’t hesitate to drop me a line here (or chat with your Halborns’ key lawyer).
