What to expect in 2025?

Amy: Hello and welcome to the Employment Law Focus podcast. I'm Amy Stokes.

Charlie: And I'm Charlie Ray

Amy: and we're both employment law partners at TLT and today we're going to be discussing the Employment Rights Bill and well all 150 pages of it, well not quite but what we've done is we have discussed amongst ourselves Charlie and I and pulled out our top 10 takeaways from it.

By way of background, this was introduced to Parliament on the 10th of October and is the first phase of delivering the government's plan to make work pay. It brings in 28 individual employment law reforms. And the bill is a wish list of reforms, and it builds in some of the labour manifesto but a watered down version so it's not quite set in stone.

Despite the headlines in the papers, it's a while before any of these changes are going to happen. Much of the details are going to be provided via regulations which won't be passed until consultation with stakeholders has concluded. Four of those consultations were very quickly turned around and have actually already started. Those include on zero hours contracts and their application to agency workers, beefing up the remedies for collective redundancy consultation, all the updates to trade union legislation and also statutory sick pay.

The government doesn't expect to start consultation however for the rest of the reforms until 2025, with the result that most reforms in the bill will not take place until we anticipate at least 2026, although there's been no commitment on that just yet. The bills also got to go through both houses of parliament before it gains royal assent and therefore may be changed along the way after the consultations as well.

So the bottom line is really that the proposals in the bill might well change and employers are going to have plenty of time to feed into the proposals and to prepare for them.

What Charlie and I have done to prepare for this podcast today is that we've picked out what we think are the most interesting elements of the bill, the reforms to the bill, primarily to employers. And we're going to run through them, not in the order of importance, just kind of in a more general order, just to give you a flavour of what they are. So, we'll talk through the background to them, the detail of the reforms, to give you a bit of an explainer on those. And then we're going to give you some of our insights from practice about what we think the real impact of those are going to be.

So, Charlie, do you want to kick us off with your first one?

Charlie: Yeah, we're going to start with probably what's been the main headline grabber from the bill, which is the proposal to remove the unfair dismissal qualifying period. Now, as we know, at the moment, we've had for some time a two -year qualifying period to be able to claim ordinary unfair dismissal. That doesn't take into account automatic unfair dismissals like whistleblowing, for example, where you don't need the two-year service, but for most unfair dismissal claims, two years service is required.

So the idea is that it's going to become a day one right, and that so long as you started work from day one, you will have the right to claim unfair dismissal. The government are proposing to consult on introducing a new statutory probation period. So, the idea is that during that probation period, an employee could be dismissed using a lighter touch process, where if the dismissal is because of capability, or conduct, or contravention of illegal duty, or potentially for some other substantial reason, which are all reasons that we're familiar with now, that that would be a valid reason for an employer to terminate at the end of this probation period.

We need some detail on this, obviously, and one suggestion is that a redundancy dismissal wouldn't be subject to this lighter touch dismissal as a result of the statutory probation period. So it will be interesting to see how that one plays out. The suggestion is that the government's preference is to have a nine -month probation period in this so -called initial period of employment and I think the indication is that they would expect an employer to at least hold a meeting with the employee to explain the concerns about say their performance if that's the reason before making a decision to dismiss. So, it's going to be interesting to see how the government will develop that.

Amy: Yeah it's really interesting actually Charlie, I think that there's going to be the consultation on that's going to bring out some interesting points. But actually, it sounds like it's going to have a really big impact on employers. What do you think in practice that's really going to be?

Charlie: Certainly one of the implications is likely to be that more litigation may follow as a resul...