On 10th October 2024, the Government announced details of the Employment Rights Bill. The Bill brings forward twenty-eight employment law reforms, many of them mirroring those set out by Labour in its ‘Plan to Make Work Pay’.
The main measures include:
- Making the right not to be unfairly dismissed a ‘day one’ right, i.e. abolishing the ‘two year unfair dismissal rule’;
- Making paternity leave, unpaid parental leave and bereavement leave ‘day one’ rights;
- Limiting the duration of probationary periods to a maximum of six months;
- Making statutory sick pay applicable from the first day of sickness absence;
- Increasing the duty on employers to grant flexible working whenever possible, and seeing flexible working as the default option for everyone;
- Requiring larger employers to address gender pay gaps and to support menopausal employees;
- Strengthening maternity rights for pregnant employees and for new mothers;
- Ending the practice of ‘fire and rehire’ as a method of enforcing changes to terms and conditions;
- Increasing the national minimum wage and removing the lower national minimum wage brackets for younger employees;
- Ending exploitative zero-hours contracts, and giving those on zero-hours contracts the right to a guaranteed hours contract if they work regular hours over a defined period; and
- Establishing a Fair Work Agency to enforce these rights.
Alongside the proposed legislation, the Government will publish a ‘Next Steps’ document to outline reforms that it will implement in the future, which are likely to include:
- A ‘right to switch off’, meaning that employees couldn’t usually be contacted outside of their working hours;
- A move towards a single status of worker (rather than distinguishing between employees and workers);
- Expanding the Equality (Race and Disparity) Bill, to make it compulsory for large employers to report their ethnicity and disability pay gap; and
- Reviewing the parental leave and carers’ leave rules.
The timescale for implementation of these reforms is expected to be up to two years from now.
If you have any concerns or would like to discuss any of the above further, please contact us at tcms@thomas-carroll.co.uk.
