On Thursday, 6 March 2025, the UK government published a further amendment paper (the “Paper”) on the Employment Rights Bill 2024 (the “Bill”). The Paper contains all proposed amendments to the Bill to date, including new changes that result from the government’s recently published responses to the four statutory consultations that were commenced in October 2024. Some of the key new developments include:
- guaranteed hours under the Bill will also apply to agency workers, with the obligation mainly being on agencies;
- both agencies and end-users will be responsible for providing workers with reasonable notice of shifts and for paying workers for late changes to shifts, including short-term cancellations;
- the maximum period of the protective award for an employer’s failure to comply with collective consultation requirements will double from 90 to 180 days’ full pay; and
- all employees remain eligible for Statutory Sick Pay under the Bill, although the Paper provides that lower earners will receive less than the standard rate.
These changes will be welcomed by agency workers and lower earners because they strengthen the protections already included in the Bill for these types of workers.
The Paper also includes some amendments to the Bill that were not considered as part of the recent statutory consultations, but are nonetheless new developments:
- the Secretary of State will be able to provide an employer with a notice of underpayment in circumstances where the employer has breached legislation by underpaying a worker;
- guaranteed hours can be contracted out of through a collective agreement, so long as they are replaced with new contractual terms; and
- the concept of “one establishment”, when considering whether collective consultation requirements for redundancy purposes apply, has been reintroduced, although further regulations may prescribe that the requirements only apply when more than 20 redundancies are proposed.
The Bill remains a work in progress and will likely be subject to additional fine-tuning before its implementation. We will keep you updated on further developments as and when they arise.
