As the Employment Rights Bill nears the end of its passage through Parliament (the Lords Report stage starts on 14 July), the Government has published its ‘roadmap’ for implementing its provisions. If you have heard me speak on this subject you’ll know that I’ve described the Bill as the biggest single piece of new employment law in history. There is a lot in it and it was always clear that implementing its measures was going to take up most of this Parliament. So far, however, we’ve largely been guessing which measures will come in first. Now we have an official plan. In this post I just want to highlight some of the key provisions.

Fire and rehire

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the Government’s announcement is that the new measures on fire and rehire are not going to be brought into force until October 2026. This is despite the fact that making it automatically unfair to dismiss an employee for refusing to agree to a contractual variation (or to replace them with another employee on varied terms) does not require any further details to be set out in Regulations once the Bill is passed. 

Why the delay? The Government says it plans to consult on the issue in Autumn 2025 but I’m not sure what there is to consult on. There is a ministerial code of practice on the issue that will need to be withdrawn once the new law is in force – but I don’t see much point in consulting on a new version with the provision in its current form. Since the practice of fire and rehire is – on the current draft of the Bill – going to be outlawed altogether except in the case of a financial emergency there really isn’t much that a Code of Practice or government guidance could say. 

I have been critical of this provision because the Government seems to be insistent that the practice of ‘fire and rehire’ is an inherently unreasonable and improper tactic. But if that is what they think, than why give employers more than a year before it is outlawed? We are of course still waiting to see if the Government proposes any substantive amendments at the House of Lords Report Stage. Perhaps they have something up their sleeve? 

Day one rights for unfair dismissal

In the Next Steps document the Government said that the abolition of the qualifying period for unfair dismissal would take effect ‘not before’ the Autumn of 2026. They have now confirmed that this means 2027 – and not necessarily early 2027 at that. The big roadblock here is that the Government needs to figure out what test of reasonableness will apply for the ‘initial period of employment’ and come up with Regulations setting that out. It also seems likely that Acas will be called upon to amend their current Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures. That all takes time and an amended Acas Code of Practice needs agreement from stakeholders on both sides of industry. So although consultation is promised for the summer/autumn of 2025  I suspect that further consultations will also be needed and a 2027 implementation date does not surprise me.

Guaranteed hours

I’ve been saying all year that the measures designed to address zero hours contracts are unlikely to be implemented before 2027 and the Government has now confirmed that. Intriguingly they do promise a consultation in the autumn of 2025. It will be interesting to see whether this consultation sets out the full details of what is being proposed or if it is little more than a call for evidence. Either way there is a long way to go before this measure becomes law. 

Third party harassment

I am slightly surprised that this measure will not be implemented until October 2026. There is no formal consultation required (or proposed) to enable this to come into force, though I suspect the Equality Commission will want time to amend its Employment Code of Practice to reflect the new law. As I have written in the past I am not entirely confident that the Commission’s approach to this matter is sound, but we shall see. 

Industrial action ballots 

I was a bit surprised to see that the Government intends to have rules on electronic and workplace ballots for industrial action in place from April 2026 with a consultation on the Regulations that will allow for this to be published in Autumn 2025. I strongly suspect that this will turn out to be more controversial and complicated than the Government currently anticipates and that this timetable will slip. If not, it is a big change to bring in at about the same time as next year’s public sector pay round! 

These things take time!

I don’t think we should be surprised by how long the implementation of this long and complicated bill will take. In the end, no-one will care – especially if this Government enjoys more than one term of office. People may have forgotten that Tony Blair’s Government also took its time. Elected in May 1997, most of its major employment law reforms took effect about two years later. Its most transformative proposal – the National Minimum Wage – took effect from April 1999 and there the Government had done a lot of spade work to prepare the ground and consult with businesses before it was even elected. The qualifying period for unfair dismissal was reduced to one year from 1 June 1999 and that was done by simple Regulation and did not require any faffing about with probationary periods. The right to be accompanied at disciplinary hearings is a straightforward right, but that did not come into force until September 2000.

But while the overall timetable for implementation is not unreasonably long, it does raise questions about the value of introducing the Bill within the first 100 days following the election. That made for an eye-catching manifesto promise but it meant that many provisions had not been fully thought through. While consultations are welcome and valuable, it would have been better if they could have taken place before the Bill was introduced. It is true that many of the details will be determined by Regulations, the Bill sets the overall shape and parameters of those Regulations Since the duty to offer guaranteed hours will not be in place until about three years after the election I think its pretty clear that setting so much detail in stone within 100 days and before any meaningful consultation could take place was a misjudgement. The Government may take another year or so trying to come up with sensible guidance on fire and rehire but that won’t avoid some of the damaging unintended consequences that I have been going on about since October.

I plan to keep going on about things for the foreseeable future. But at least we now know what the plan is and we should welcome that progress.