The King’s Speech – Employment Law Reforms
During the King’s Speech this month, the government announced the introduction of two new pieces of employment legislation to enact the provisions of Labour’s “New Deal for Working People”.
The two bills are an Employment Rights Bill and a draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill.
Employment Rights Bill
The King announced “My Government is committed to making work pay and will legislate to introduce a new deal for working people to ban exploitative practices and enhance employment rights.”
The Employment Rights Bill, which the government plan to introduce within the first one hundred days of the parliamentary session, represents “the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation”.
Key legislative changes include:
- Banning “exploitative” zero-hour contracts, ensuring workers have a right to a contract that reflects the number of hours they regularly work and that all workers get reasonable notice of any changes in shifts, with proportionate compensation for any shifts cancelled or curtailed.
- Ending ‘fire and rehire’ and ‘fire and replace’ by reforming the law to provide effective remedies and replacing the previous statutory code.
- Making parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal available from day one on the job for all workers. Employers will still be able to operate probationary periods to assess new hires.
- Strengthening statutory sick pay by removing the lower earnings limit to make it available to all workers.
- Making flexible working the default from day one for all workers, with employers required to accommodate this as far as is “reasonable”.
- Strengthening protections for new mothers by making it unlawful to dismiss a woman who has had a baby within six months of her return to work, except in specific circumstances.
- Establishing a new single enforcement body, also known as a Fair Work Agency, to strengthen the enforcement of workplace rights.
- Establishing a Fair Pay Agreement in the adult social care sector and, following review, assessing how and to what extent such agreements could benefit other sectors.
- Reinstating the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, to establish national terms and conditions, career progression routes, and pay rates for teaching assistants, caretakers, office staff, technicians, catering staff, cleaners and all other support staff working in schools.
- Updating trade union legislation, removing unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity, including the previous government’s approach to minimum service levels, and ensuring industrial relations are based around good faith negotiation and bargaining.
- Simplifying the process of statutory recognition and introducing a regulated route to ensure workers and union members have a reasonable right to access a union within workplaces.
A draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill
In his speech, the King also announced that “Legislation on race equality will be published in draft to enshrine the full right to equal pay in law.”
The draft bill will aim to tackle inequality for ethnic minority and disabled people by:
- Enshrining in law the full right to equal pay for ethnic minorities and disabled people, introducing a new right to bring equal pay claims.
- Introducing mandatory ethnicity and disability pay reporting for larger employers (those with 250+ employees) to help close the ethnicity and disability pay gaps.
Conclusions
Whilst many of the above reforms have been welcomed, concerns have been raised about the impact they could have on the Employment Tribunal system, which is already overstretched with parties waiting many months or years for claims to be decided. It remains to be seen whether any additional funding will be provided to the tribunal service to cater for the prospective claims arising from any new legislation.
Furthermore, whilst the commitment is to introduce the legislation within the first one hundred days (by around mid October 2024) in reality, the ambitious reforms will take many months to pass through both Houses of Parliament and receive Royal Assent. The changes are unlikely to come into force until 2025 at the very earliest and likely on a piecemeal basis.
The two new bills have potentially far reaching implications for both employees and employers, and we will keep you up to date with the latest developments as they arise.
Contact us
Tyson Taylor is a senior solicitor in our employment law team. If you have any questions or concerns about any of the topics discussed in this article, or if you have an employment law enquiry, please contact us.