The government are truly keeping us on our toes at the minute, and the Employment Rights Bill got another bit of a shake up on Monday night this week.
Keep a look out for more detailed information on this in our future blogs but the most important bits to highlight to you for now are:
- NDAs and discrimination
This is the update which has caused the most headlines: Non Disclosure Agreements will no longer be able to be used to silence employees who have faced discrimination, harassment or abuse. It renders any contract between a worker and employer that tries to attempt to prevent the worker making allegations or disclosures about harassment or discrimination void. This is not just for employment contracts, it includes settlement agreements.
What you can do now: review your templates, get ahead of the game and make sure that your template contracts don’t fall foul of this and if your business relies on settlement agreements, then this might be a wider conversation which is needed with the key stakeholders of the business.
If you are a client at Precept or use our templates, you should already be complying with this update because we make clear that disclosures of this nature wouldn’t be covered by any confidentiality restrictions.
- Bereavement leave for miscarriage
Currently, the statutory right time off or pay in cases of miscarriages which occur before the 24th week of pregnancy are non-existent. New rights that will be introduced with the Employment Rights Bill will mean that anyone affected by a miscarriage before 24 weeks, including partners, will be entitled to statutory bereavement leave. The precise amount of time that employees will be allowed to have off will be consulted on, but we expect it will be at least one week.
What you can do now: update your family leave policies and make sure your managers are aware of the upcoming changes.
- Boost to whistle-blower protections
Employees who speak up about wrongdoing may also be getting stronger protections (although these proposals aren’t fully supported by the government so we’ve yet to see if they will make it through the legislative process). Generally, the proposed amendments here will seek to simplify the language around what constitutes a protected disclosure and expand these to cover mismanagement of public funds and/or abuse of authority. It’s also proposed that the disclosure must be in the public interest (rather than the current test where it’s enough for the worker to reasonably believe it is in the public interest). There would then be extra protections with a new “Office of the Whistleblower” created to be the primary reporting channel for disclosures and support.
What you can do now: make sure your whistleblowing policy isn’t just a forgotten about PDF, train managers to know how to spot a concern and how to respond properly.
- Fire & rehire
We already know that the government want to clamp down on dismissing employees who refuse to agree a contract variation: in fact, a ban on dismissing an employee or refusing to agree to a contract variation is in the Bill meaning that a dismissal in these circumstances would be automatically unfair, unless the variation was necessary to avoid “calamitous financial distress”. There have been a few proposals to amend this aspect of the Bill and we don’t fully know which has the government’s support (if any actually do). Generally, it’s looking like the ban will only be to “restricted variations”, not every single type of variation. We expect the ban to cover changes to pay, pension, hours of work and holiday entitlement. Employers will still need to go through a proper consultation process before they can look at dismissing and offering re-engagement on new terms.
What you can do now: for now, nothing, but keep an eye out on our updates and if you are thinking of changing T&C’s, get legal advice from your friendly neighbourhood Precept team.
- Zero hour contracts
Under the Bill Zero hour contracts won’t be banned, instead, in its current form, the legislation would require employers to offer those on zero or low hours contracts a guaranteed hours contract following a certain reference period. One proposed amendment to the Employment Rights Bill is, rather than requiring employers to offer guaranteed hours, workers would have the right to request guaranteed hours, just like the flexible working request process. In our head, this would make a large amount of practical sense. Unfortunately, we don’t think the government support this proposed amendment so it might not actually become law, but we will wait and see and keep you updated.
What you can do now: for now, nothing, and potentially, this one won’t be passed anyway but keep an eye on our updates for all the latest information you’ll need.
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