Employment Edit: 6 November 2025

Legal Updates

Employment Rights Bill – ping pong

The Employment Rights Bill continues to be the subject of debate in Parliament, with the Bill remaining in a period of ‘ping-pong’. This is the term used for the to and fro of amendments between the House of Commons and House of Lords as they try to resolve the final points of disagreement in a Bill.

Last week, the House of Lords voted in favour of various proposed changes to the Bill, including amendments that would:

• introduce a six-month qualifying period for unfair dismissal claims (rather than unfair dismissal becoming a ‘day one’ right);
• add a mechanism allowing a worker to opt out of the right to a guaranteed hours contract; and
• retain the existing turnout threshold for industrial action ballots (which requires at least 50% of those entitled to vote in a ballot to have done so).

Yesterday, the House of Commons disagreed with each of these amendments. It supported alternative amendments that would introduce a statutory requirement for the government to consult prior to issuing regulations on a range of key details relating to the unfair dismissal reform and would require the government to consider the impact of e-balloting before removing the industrial action ballot threshold requirement. The Bill will now return to the House of Lords for reconsideration. We will continue to keep you posted on all key Employment Rights Bill developments in the coming weeks, including any news on when the Bill might be passed.

Additional and necessary detail on many of the reforms in the Bill will be set out in separate regulations, which will be published following consultation. On 23 October 2025, the government launched four consultations seeking views on the underlying detail relating to four areas of reform – trade union rights of access, the duty to inform workers of their right to join a union, dismissal protection for pregnant employees & new mothers and bereavement leave. We explore those consultations below.

Trade unions – access rights and the duty to inform

The first two consultations relate to trade union reforms – the right of trade unions to access workplaces and the duty to inform workers of right to join a union. Both of these consultations are set to close on 18 December 2025.

Key points from these consultations include:

• Consultation on access agreements – The Bill provides for trade unions to access workplaces (physically and/or digitally) for the purposes of meeting, recruiting or organising workers or facilitating collective bargaining, with this access organised through legally enforceable ‘access agreements’. This reform is set to take effect in October 2026 with a draft Code of Practice on the right of access expected to be published in spring 2026. The consultation sets out the government’s proposals on the form that a trade union’s access request should take as well as the details that the employer would be required to include in its response. The government also seeks views on its suggested timeframes for the access request process, including a proposal to allow 5 working days for the employer to respond to a request and, if the request is rejected, a period of 15 working days for the parties to negotiate. The consultation also explores both the determination powers that the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) would have if the parties cannot agree an access agreement voluntarily and the enforcement powers the CAC will have if a party breaches an agreement (including imposing a potential fine of up to £75,000 for initial breaches and up to £150,000 for repeated breaches). Finally, the government seeks views on a suggested exemption for employers with fewer than 21 employers which, if implemented, would be a welcome relief for small employers.
• Consultation on the duty to inform workers of their right to join a union – The Bill includes a new duty on employers to inform workers of their right to join a trade union via a written statement at the outset of employment and at other ‘prescribed times’. This duty is set to come into force in October 2026. In this consultation, the government sets out its proposals relating to the form and content of that statement – this includes a proposal for the government to provide a standard form statement, detailing the functions of a trade union, statutory rights relating to union membership and a signpost to gov.uk page listing trade unions. Each employer would then tailor the standard form statement with workplace-specific details such as which trade unions are recognised by that employer. As well as providing the statement directly to new workers at the outset of their employment, the government proposes that employers should redeliver the statement annually (albeit it also consults on the potential for the reminder statement to be provided to existing workers indirectly, for example via a noticeboard or staff portal).

Pregnancy and maternity – dismissal protections

In its Next Steps to Make Work Pay policy paper published last October, the government set out plans to make it unlawful to dismiss pregnant employees and new mothers within 6 months of their return to work, except for in specific circumstances. In another of the consultations launched on 23 October, the government is now consulting on the scope of these proposed new protections, which are set to take effect in 2027.

Key topics covered in the consultation, which closes on 15 January 2026, include:

• What the ‘specific circumstances’ enabling an employer to fairly dismiss a pregnant employee or new mother (a protected employee) should be. The government included two potential options in the consultation paper. The first option would be to introduce a stricter standard that employers would be required to meet when defending a claim of unfair dismissal from a protected employee. The second option would be to remove or narrow some of the existing potential fair reasons for dismissal, where the dismissal relates to a protected employee. For example, might ‘capability’ or ‘some other substantial reason’ be removed as fair reasons for dismissal for protected employees?
• Whether the protection should kick in from the start of employment or after a qualifying period.
• Whether the protections should extend beyond pregnant employees and new mothers to those who take other types of family-related leave such as adoption leave or shared parental leave. The government confirmed it is not considering paternity leave as part of the enhanced dismissal protection. Instead, the government intends to explore any potential impact on paternity leave as part of its ongoing review of the UK’s parental leave and pay system (read more about this review here).
• When the protection window (during which the employee benefits from this enhanced protection) should end. Two options put forward by the government in the consultation are 18 months after the birth of the child or six months after the end of maternity leave.

Bereavement leave

The fourth consultation launched by the government on 23 October relates to the new ‘day one’ right to unpaid bereavement leave that is set to be introduced in 2027. This new right will be separate to the existing right to paid parental bereavement leave for employees who lose a child under the age of 18 or who experience a stillbirth after 24 weeks of pregnancy.
 
Key details about the new right to unpaid bereavement leave, including the length of the leave entitlement and the qualifying requirements, will need to be set out in regulations. The consultation, which closes on 15 January 2026, invites respondents to provide their views on various of these qualifying requirements including the required relationship that the bereaved employee must have had with the deceased – will the new right be restricted to immediate family members (such as spouses, partners, parents and children) or will it extend further to grandparents and grandchildren and other extended family (such as aunts, uncles and cousins)? The consultation also includes questions relating to the extension of the right to unpaid bereavement leave to those who experience pregnancy loss in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Digital HR1 form

Use of a new digital HR1 form will soon become compulsory for any employer notifying the Secretary of State of proposed collective redundancies.
 
Where an employer is proposing 20 or more redundancies ‘at one establishment’ within a period of 90 days, it must notify the Secretary of State of these proposed redundancies via an HR1 form. Until recently, the only way to satisfy this obligation was to complete the HR1 form (in Word or Open Document format, both of which are available on this gov.uk page) and then send the completed form and any attachments to [email protected]. A digital version of this form was recently launched on the gov.uk page. Some of the questions included in the digital version of the form are slightly different or contain limitations – for example, the employer is no longer required to provide a breakdown of the affected employees by occupational group and there is no option to provide a consultation date in the future. It is also important to note that the digital form will ‘time out’ and will not save information, meaning it must be completed in one sitting.
 
After 30 November 2025, the digital form will be the only available method to submit an HR1 notification. Affected employers should consider how to go about collating and signing off the information required before submitting the form digitally and ensuring that they save or print the summary page for their records. For example, it might be sensible to prepare an offline version of the form (including any attachments) which can be reviewed and authorised by appropriate personnel internally before then submitting that information and documentation via the digital form on the date of notification.