Employment Edit: 22 May 2025

Immigration White Paper

Last week, the government detailed its plans to reform the current UK immigration system in its White Paper titled ‘Restoring Control over the Immigration System‘. In line with the government’s aims to reduce the UK’s reliance on overseas labour and bring down net migration, the proposals in the White Paper focus on prioritising and upskilling the domestic workforce.

The White Paper details the most significant set of business immigration changes since 2020 – the effect of these proposals (if implemented) on employers who currently rely on overseas nationals to fill vacancies would be significant. In this blog post, Megan Summers and Shannon Willett run through the top 10 things employers should know about the White Paper.

EHRC consultation

Earlier this week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) launched a consultation into its code of practice for services, public functions and associations. The EHRC is consulting on changes it proposes to make to the code following the Supreme Court’s judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers (which we covered in a previous edition of Edit, available here). The consultation will close on 30 June 2025.

Extended pay gap reporting

In March, the government launched a consultation into its proposal to introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting for employers with 250 or more employees.

The consultation makes it clear that the new reporting requirements should reflect the framework of the existing gender pay gap reporting regime. However, it also recognises that there are some additional considerations for ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting, including practicalities relating to data collection and privacy concerns that can arise where there is a small data set.

In this briefing, Katherine Flower and Rebecca Mullins review the proposals detailed in the consultation and consider some of the potential issues for employers to grapple with.