Less than two weeks after the general election, we heard the King's Speech. We now know what the new Government's priorities will be for this Parliament.
So what did it say about employment law?
We've waited several years for a new Employment Bill and now we have two! Although the Bills were mentioned briefly in the Speech, we must turn to lengthy background briefing notes published by the Prime Minister's Office to find out what the Bills will actually do.
The first is the Employment Rights Bill. This will deliver on policies set out in Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering A New Deal for Working People – The Labour Party that need primary legislation (i.e. an Act of Parliament) to implement. The briefing notes list the commitments in the Plan, which we presume will be covered by the Employment Rights Bill. They include:
- Banning exploitative zero-hour contracts and ensuring workers have a right to a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work
- Ending "fire and rehire" by reforming the law to provide effective remedies and replacing the Statutory Code of Conduct
- Making parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal available from day one for all workers. Employers will still be able to operate probationary periods
- Changing statutory sick pay by removing the lower earnings limit and the waiting period
- Making flexible working the default from day one for all workers. Employers will have to accommodate this "as far as is reasonable" to reflect the modern workplace
- Strengthening protections for new mothers by making it unlawful to dismiss a woman who has had a baby for six months after she returns to work (with some exceptions)
- Establishing a new Single Enforcement Body to strengthen the enforcement of workplace rights
- Updating trade union legislation to remove "unnecessary" restrictions on trade union activity, which will include repealing the law on minimum service levels during industrial action
- Simplifying statutory recognition of trade unions and ensuring that workers and union members have a reasonable right to access a union within the workplace.
Clearly, with many of these proposals the precise impacts will only become clear when we have the detail, for example in relation to some of the exceptions. What is clear is that employees will have much more significant rights from an earlier stage in employment, and employers will need to adapt their policies and practices.
The briefing notes also include references to gender pay gap action plans, the menopause and sexual harassment at work, without saying if these measures will appear in the Employment Rights Bill. We will need to wait for the Bill to see precisely what it contains.
The Bill will be introduced during the first 100 days of the new Government (ie by mid-October) but it is likely to take much longer than this to go through the legislative process and become an Act of Parliament.
The second new Bill is the draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill. This will give ethnic minorities and disabled people "the full right to equal pay", making it easier for them to bring equal pay claims (according to the briefing notes). The Bill will also introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay reporting for employers with 250 or more employees. Employers may find this more difficult to comply with than the existing gender pay gap reporting regime as race is not binary and, particularly with regard to disabilities, data collection can be challenging.
Other proposals that could impact on employers include regulating the development of AI, action to get people back into work following the pandemic, and reform of the apprenticeship levy. Despite appearing in the King's Speech, they're not included in the briefing notes so we will have to wait for further details.
There is no doubt that the new Government has hit the ground running and HR professionals will be busy over the next few months working out what these changes mean for them. If you have any queries on how these proposals are likely to impact on your organisation, please get in touch with your usual WBD contact.
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Interested to hear more about what the new Labour government could change in the world of employment? Why not listen to our post-election podcast, where partners Dan Fawcett and Gearalt Fahy discuss this in more detail? Listen here >
This article is for general information only and reflects the position at the date of publication. It does not constitute legal advice.