Employment Rights Bill: 8 Things Your HR Department Needs to Know

During the state opening of Parliament and the King’s Speech, the Government trailed its Employment Rights Bill, which will make wide-ranging and radical changes to employment law in the coming years.

In advance of the publication of the full text of the Employment Rights Bill, what do HR professionals need to know about what is in store for them?

Amendments to regulations around unfair dismissal are probably the most significant changes in the proposed legislation. They would involve the removal of the two-year service requirement to bring an unfair dismissal claim.

There are clearly concerns among HR professionals that this change will mean that employers will have to review how they:

• manage, train and induct new recruits; and
• deal with employees who are not performing during their probationary period.

The Government may choose to accompany this change with non-statutory guidance or a more formal statutory code of practice setting out a minimum fair procedure for employers to follow before they can dismiss an employee during their probationary period. This would extend the time needed for the Government to implement this reform.

Other changes on the way and points to note include:

• Reforms to flexible working laws, making flexible working the default from day one for all workers, with employers required to accommodate this as far as is reasonable;
• Procedural changes to statutory sick pay (SSP), removing the requirement for earnings to be at the lower earnings limit as an eligibility criterion and also removing the three-day waiting period;
• Improving relations with trade unions, including simplification of the statutory trade union recognition process;
• Zero hours contracts – clarification of Government plans still awaited, but it is possible they may take a targeted approach to stamping out unfair zero hours contacts, rather than banning them outright;
• Ethnicity/disability pay gap – proposals requiring employers with 250 or more employees to report their ethnicity pay gap and disability pay gap will be included in the separate Equality (Race and Disability) Bill;
• The Employment Rights Bill is expected to be published by 12 October at the latest;
• Expect a long lead-in time for many of the proposals – some of the proposals will require public consultation.