Employment Rights Bill 2024-25

The Employment Rights Bill 2024-25 was introduced on 10 October 2024. It is bill 11 of the 2024-25 parliamentary session. The bill is listed for second reading on Monday 21 October 2024.

Most of the bill applies to England, Scotland and Wales, but not Northern Ireland where employment law is devolved. However, some clauses have different territorial extent, for example part 3 on sectoral bargaining in social care and school staff does not apply in Scotland.

A money resolution will be required for the bill as it requires additional expenditure, for example due to the changes to statutory sick pay and the establishment of a new labour market enforcement body.

This briefing does not provide an exhaustive guide to every clause of the bill. Analysis focuses on clauses that have legally or politically significant effects. See the bill’s explanatory notes (PDF) for further detail on other clauses.

Employment law in the last decade

Between 2010 and 2024 there was relatively little new employment legislation, with most key laws, such as the Employment Rights Act 1996, dating from the 1990s.

Two significant pieces of primary legislation related to industrial relations have been passed in the last decade. The Trade Union Act 2016 imposed several new restrictions on trade unions in respect of industrial action and their finances and administration. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 created a framework allowing the government to set minimum service levels during strikes in several key sectors, though in practice the legislation has not been used to date by employers.

Both these acts proved controversial, being opposed by trade unions and the Labour Party, which has stated its intention to repeal them both.

Alongside this, there have been many private members’ bills introduced on various aspects of employment law. Many of these, on topics such as banning fire and rehire, regulating zero hours contracts or protecting pregnant employees from redundancy, did not receive a second reading. Others, such as the Parental Bereavement (Leave and Pay) Act 2018, became law.

More recently, during the 2022-23 parliamentary session, a series of seven private members’ bills, all with government support, passed and became law, on topics including tipping, redundancy protections and family leave, flexible working and protection from sexual harassment at work.

What would the bill do?

The bill largely implements plans that were outlined in the Labour Party’s pre-election June 2024 publication Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay: Delivering A New Deal for Working People (PDF). This plan was largely based on Labour’s September 2022 Employment Rights Green Paper: A new deal for working people (PDF).

Major topics covered by the bill include:

• Zero hours contracts – introducing a right to reasonable notice of shifts and to be offered a contract with guaranteed hours, reflecting hours regularly worked.
• Flexible working – requiring employers to justify the refusal of flexible working requests.
• Statutory sick pay – removing the three-day waiting period (so employees are eligible from the first day of illness or injury) and the lower earnings limit test for eligibility.
• Family leave – removing the qualifying period for paternity leave and ordinary parental leave (so employees have the right from the first day of employment), and expanding eligibility for bereavement leave.
• Protection from harassment – expanding employers’ duties to prevent harassment of staff.
• Unfair dismissal – removing the two-year qualifying period (so employees are protected from unfair dismissal from the first day of employment), subject to a potential probationary period.
• Fire and rehire – making it automatically unfair to dismiss workers because they refuse to agree to a variation of contract.
• Sectoral collective bargaining – reintroducing the School Staff Negotiating Body and creating an Adult Social Care Negotiating Body, which could determine pay and other terms and conditions for workers in these sectors.
• Trade unions – introducing rights for trade unions to access workplaces, and repealing the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 and most provisions of the Trade Union Act 2016.
• Enforcement – bringing together powers of existing labour market enforcement bodies, along with some new powers, under the Secretary of State and enforcement officers

Alongside the bill, on 10 October, the government published a policy paper Next Steps to Make Work Pay. This outlined its wider approach to employment rights, including some reforms outside of this bill, and set out the government’s intentions for future consultations and implementation of some of the measures in this bill:

We expect to begin consulting on these reforms in 2025, seeking significant input from all stakeholders, and anticipate this meaning that the majority of reforms will take effect no earlier than 2026. Reforms of unfair dismissal will take effect no sooner than autumn 2026.