A North East employment law expert is advising regional business owners to act quickly to address the impact of the biggest shake-up of employment rights in a generation on their business operations.
Paul McGowan, founder of Newcastle-headquartered specialist employment law firm Collingwood Legal, was speaking as the far-reaching Employment Rights Bill passed its last parliamentary hurdle before becoming law.
The Bill was one of the flagship pieces of proposed legislation that the Labour Party put forward during its 2024 election campaign with a view to improving worker protections, job security and working conditions by banning controversial ‘fire and rehire’ processes and ending ‘exploitative’ zero hours contracts.
Key measures include employers having to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, whether from colleagues or other third parties, while from next April, the three-day waiting period that employees have to undertake before claiming statutory sick pay when they’re ill will also be removed.
The government’s original plan to give new employees the right to lodge a claim for unfair dismissal from the day they start a new job was watered down at the last minute to be six months instead, although it is still significantly sooner than the current two years’ service required before gaining that right.
With the bill now expected to come into force before Christmas, Paul McGowan is advising North East employers to make sure they fully understand the changes that have come in, what the impact on their operations might be and what systems and processes they should be changing or updating now to make sure they have everything in order.
He says: “The Employment Rights Act will have a range of far-reaching consequences on North East businesses, and the impacts it will have on the ways in which they run their staffing operations will be very significant and diverse.
“There is now an extra imperative on employers to make sure their managers have the knowledge and training required to lawfully and effectively manage and assess staff, so they’re not unwittingly leading the business into any difficult situations.”
A new Fair Work Agency has also been created which will take responsibility for enforcing a wide range of employment rights and will be able to bring claims to the Employment Tribunal service on behalf of workers.
Paul McGowan continues: “The ‘day one’ right to making an unfair dismissal claim would have put more pressure on employers to get both their recruitment and onboarding processes right, and we’d anecdotally heard of a number of employers slowing down their recruitment decisions as a result.
“Extending the qualifying period to six months is a common sense measure that will provide businesses with the latitude required to make sure a hiring decision has been the right one, but it is still likely to need managers to spend more time and resources making sure their recruitment processes are fully fit for purpose.
“Sexual harassment obviously has absolutely no place in the workplace, but there will be practical issues and steps employers can take now to help them meet their extended responsibilities.
“For example, while it may be difficult for employers in the regional hospitality sector to get all their customers to behave appropriately towards their staff at all times, they as employers will be required to show that they’ve taken all reasonable steps to ensure that they do so.
“There is a lot more detail to come around the implementation of the new Bill, and a lot of learning that will follow from practical experience.
“In the meantime, it’s essential that business owners and managers make sure their operations are being managed in ways which fully comply with their updated responsibilities and act as quickly as possible to address any areas where they think they may be at risk of falling short.”