I’ve always loved autumn. Oddly it’s always felt like the start of a year to me rather than the end of one. It’s a very flexible season too – when would you say it actually gives way to winter? The end of November? Later? 

It’s worth asking because the Government has committed to consulting on a range of issues over the course of this autumn as part of its implementation programme for the Employment Rights Bill (still just a Bill at the time of writing). When the Bill becomes an Act nothing will change immediately. Some measures (mostly to do with the effective repeal of the Trade Union Act 2016) will come into force two months after Royal Assent. Other measures, however, have to be brought into force by the new Minister for Employment Rights, Kate Dearden MP. Over the summer, the Business Department published a timetable for implementing the Bill and the new Business Secretary Peter Kyle. confirmed in the Commons that the Government intends to stick to it (see Column 1208). 

Most of the key measures in the Bill are due to be brought in over the course of the next two years. Importantly many of them need further secondary legislation to be introduced in order to flesh out the sometimes sketchy details we have in the Bill itself. Before those Regulations can be introduced the Government needs to consult on what exactly they should say. 

So the timetable sets out the consultations that the Government intends to conduct and when those consultations will be launched. An awful lot of them are due ‘in the autumn’ of this year. I thought it would be worth looking at just how much the Government has committed to producing before winter sets in.

[UPDATE: 23 October 2025. Four consultations were published this morning and I plan to keep updating this post as more of them come in. See below for the details of each and links to the consultation documents. I would just note at this stage that we do not yet have consultations on the most difficult topics. The fact that as of today we still don’t have a consultation on union ballots makes me even more doubtful that we will see a change in the rules as early as next April, though I’m ready to eat my words on that if need be]

The School Staff Negotiating Body

The Bill paves the way for a negotiating body to determine the pay and conditions of school support staff across England.  This will cover academies as well as all schools run or maintained by local authorities. The basic idea is that the body will reach an agreement about terms and conditions, training or career progression and submit those agreements to the Secretary of State. If they are ratified, then Regulations will be issued which will then become incorporated into the contracts of employment of the relevant staff. 

There is a lot to be sorted out before this body can be up and running. Given that it applies not just to local authority schools but also academies there is the question of how employers will be represented. Unions also will have to decide who represents the workers side and that may depend to an extent on exactly which non-teaching staff the body will cover. These are all matters that will need to be covered by the consultation. I would hope that discussions have already been taking place behind the scenes so that the consultation will be able to chart a clear way forward that will command widespread agreement. 

Adult Social Care

The Bill also provides for the creation of a similar negotiating body for the Adult Social Care Sector. Here the Government has already made considerable progress and a detailed consultation about the operation of that body has already been launched and will run until 16 January. The body itself is due to come into existence in the autumn of 2027 with the first agreement being ready for ratification by April 2028. I’d say that seems doable. 

Unfair Dismissal

Day one rights for unfair dismissal is one of the key provisions in the Bill. While abolishing the two-year qualifying period is in itself straightforward, the Government has decided to complicate the issue by legislating for an ‘initial period of employment’ during which a different standard of reasonableness will apply. I have deep reservations about this but we are where we are. The qualification period is currently scheduled to remain in place until 2027 to allow the proposals for the initial period of employment to be developed and for Acas to reflect them in an amended Code of Practice. Re-drafting a key Acas Code is no small matter and so it is important that the Government starts consulting on this soon. This is a key consultation to watch out for. 

Trade Union Measures

The Government intends to consult on a range of trade union measures. Three are worth highlighting. First of all, the Bill requires an employer to give workers a statement – alongside the written statement of terms and conditions – informing them of their right to join a trade union. Regulations are needed to specify exactly how that statement should be given and what other union rights it should refer to.

A more controversial measure is the trade union right of access which will allow trade unions access to a non-unionised workplace for the purposes of meeting the workers to provide support and representation as well as seeking to recruit them to union membership. This will all be covered by a union access agreement which the union will agree with the employer or which – where no agreement is reached – will be imposed by the Central Arbitration Committee. Detailed Regulations are needed to flesh the process out and make it workable and the Government intends the new right to be in place by October 2026. There are some very large and influential employers who are going to have a problem with this so the lobbying will be fierce. 

The third measure relates to ballots for industrial action and other trade union matters. Technically the Bill does not introduce anything new here – it merely nods in the direction of Section 54 of the Employment Relations Act 2004. This allows Regulations to specify the ways in which ballots may be conducted – which would include electronic or workplace ballots. The Government’s intention is to allow industrial action ballots to be conducted either electronically or in the workplace by April 2026. To meet that deadline they really need to get moving. The Regulations governing workplace or electronic ballots will be complicated and lots of stakeholders will want to contribute to the consultation. To be honest, I really don’t see this measure coming into force by April – but we shall see.

[UPDATE 23 October 2025: Two consultations have been published.

The consultation on the Trade Union Right of Access can be found here. It seems quite straightforward – I suspect the main pushback from employers will be the very tight timescales for decided whether to agree to access and to negotiate the access agreement itself. The consultation closes on 18 December 2025 and there will be a further consultation in the Spring of 2026 on a Code of Practice. Implementation in October 2026 seems doable.

The consultation on the duty to inform employees of their trade union rights can be found here. It also closes on 18 December and the new right will be introduced in October 2026 alongside the right to access. It seems that the statement will have to be quite detailed and I suspect it will end up being a government drafted statement that employers will have to give employers with some room for the employer to fill in the details of any trade unions it recognises. Employers might not like the suggestion of having to re-issue the statement every six months, which is one of the options, but otherwise this is not a particularly onerous requirement] 

Fire and Rehire

I’m a bit puzzled by this one. If you’ve read this blog before or heard me speak about Employment Rights Bill you know that I am not a fan of the Bill’s provisions effectively banning fire and rehire – but I don’t see that there is much to consult about before the scheduled implementation date of October 2026. There is a power to make Regulations extending the definition of a ‘restricted variation’ – but no need to exercise that power before bringing the new right in. Perhaps the Government is thinking about an amendment to the Code of Practice on Dismissal and Reengagement. That will certainly need to be withdrawn, but I don’t really think we need to consult on a new one. The circumstances in which fire and rehire will be permitted are so limited that I’m not sure a code of practice will have much to say other than ‘don’t do it’. Still, I’ll be interested to see what the Government wants our help with.

Regulation of Umbrella Companies

Nothing to do with protection against the rain here. Umbrella companies act as the employer of essentially self-employed or freelance workers who are doing work – often quite specialised work – for client companies. You could see them as freelancers clubbing together to take care of tax and other issues, but they could also be operating like employment agencies. The Bill amends the Employment Agencies Act 1973 to bring them within that regularory framework. Quite what consultation is needed before this happens I don’t know. Perhaps I’m missing something. Please let me know in the comments if this is an issue close to your heart.

Bereavement Leave

We currently have a right to parental bereavement leave which gives two weeks’ leave to parents who lose a child. This is paid at the equivalent of the lower rate of SMP (currently £187.18 per week). The Bill extends this to cover bereavement more generally as well as pregnancy loss. The details of the right are to be set out in Regulations (as they currently are for parental bereavement leave)  and with a consultation this autumn the Government should be ready to implement the new right in 2027. It may seem surprising that it will take that long, but since employers can recover statutory bereavement pay from the Government via their NI contributions it is actually quite complicated to get all the various systems in place to allow for that. 

[UPDATE 23 October 2025. The government has published its consultation which you can find here. Given the limited nature of the right I don’t expect it to case much controversy – although there may be some debate about what relationship the employee needs to have to the deceased person in order to claim leave. Consultation closes on 15 January 2026]

Rights for Pregnant Workers

It really isn’t very clear what the Government has in mind here. The Bill makes an amendment to S.49D of the Employment Rights Act 1996 which allows for Regulations dealing with redundancy during or after pregnancy. This widened to cover dismissal more generally and provides for regulations that might require particular procedures to be followed or evidence to be provided before someone who is pregnant can be lawfully dismissed. This might be a radical change or it might be altogether more modest and so the consultation process will be crucial. The Government intends to consult this autumn with a view to introducing the new rights – whatever they may be –  sometime in 2027.

[UPDATE 23 October 2025. The Government has now published its consultation and you can find the full details here. The consultation leaves the question of what protections will be provided very much open and I’ll be blogging more about what it says in future posts. The consultation ends on 15 January 2026]

Ending the Exploitative Use of Zero Hours Contracts

I wish the Government luck with this one. Clause 1 of the Bill sets out the framework for employers having to offer guaranteed hours to workers on zero hours contract or whose contractual hours fall below a specified number. It is a hugely complex provision and drafting the Regulations that will be needed to make it work is a mammoth task. By my count there are about 15 things that the Minister will have to decide before the Regulations can be finalised – including who the new right will apply to, what pattern of work will trigger the duty to make an offer and how that offer will have to be framed in order to reflect the workers’s pattern of work over the reference period. If any provision of the Employment Rights Bill is going to be left on the back burner it is this one and the first key test is whether the consultation really does materialise this autumn and whether, when it does, there is any sign that the Government has thought through exactly how the new right will work.

Winter is Coming…

So that is nine sets of consultation due to be launched this autumn. As I write this one has been launched and the remaining eight are pending. My plan is to update this post as the new consultations are produced [see above!]. Perhaps they will all come out in the next week or so [some did]– or perhaps some will take longer than others [so it seems]. The new Minister has a lot on her plate – as do the civil servants who have to produce the consultations documents which will explain the proposals and their background and assess their likely impact. Spare a thought too for the policy people working in trade unions and employers’ organisations who will need to consult their members and formulate their responses within a very tight timescale. We might even have some sympathy to spare for the professional lobbyists who are facing a busy – though lucrative – autumn.  

I can’t remember a time when so many consultations of such importance were scheduled to take place in such a short period of time. If any of them slip into next year then that will have a domino effect – more consultations are already due early next year. If there is any slippage then some may start to doubt the Government’s overall commitment to implementing the Bill in full before the next election. It’s going to be fun to watch.