In the King’s Speech on 17 July 2024, the new Labour government set out its legislative agenda for the next few months. Labour law reform was a key plank of Labour’s election campaign, so it is no surprise that it was mentioned in the King’s Speech:
“My government is committed to making work worthwhile and will initiate a new workers’ convention to ban exploitative practices and strengthen labour rights.”
The announcements in the King’s Speech were accompanied by brief background notes.
The government proposes to introduce two new employment bills:
Labor Rights Bill
The Workers’ Rights Bill appears in the Economic Stability and Growth section of the Briefing Notes and includes commitments to:
- Prohibit exploitative employment contracts that do not specify working hours;
- End the “scourges” of “dismissal and reassignment” and “dismissal and replacement” by providing effective remedies and replacing the previous government’s legislative act;
- Making parental leave, sick pay and protection against unfair dismissal available from day one in the job for all workers (although this would not affect employers’ ability to run probationary periods to assess new employees);
- Strengthening statutory sick pay by removing the minimum income and waiting period;
- Make flexible working the default from day one for all workers, with employers required to accommodate this as much as is reasonable;
- Strengthen the protection of new mothers by making it illegal to expel a woman who has given birth for six months after her return, except in specific circumstances;
- Establish a new single enforcement body to strengthen the enforcement of rights in the workplace;
- Establish a fair pay agreement in the adult social care sector and assess how other sectors can benefit from this;
- Reconstitute the School Support Staff Negotiating Body to set national terms and conditions, career progression paths, and fair pay rates;
- Modernise trade union legislation, remove unnecessary restrictions on trade union activity, including the previous government’s approach to minimum service levels, and ensure that industrial relations are based on good faith negotiations;
- Simplify the process of legal recognition and introduce a structured pathway to ensure that workers and union members have a reasonable right to access a union within their workplace.
The briefing notes point to an increase in the number of people in less secure forms of work, including zero-hour contracts, which have risen to more than a million over the past decade. The bill would provide greater security and predictability for these workers. Furthermore, the briefing notes also state that extending protections to workers from day one would encourage more workers to change jobs, which is associated with higher wages and productivity growth.
The Employment Rights Bill also outlines the government’s intention to introduce a “real living wage that takes into account the cost of living” and remove “discriminatory age brackets”.
Equality (Race and Disability) Bill
This is reflected in the “Breaking Barriers to Opportunity” section of the briefing notes.
The Equality (Race and Disability) Bill aims to address inequality for ethnic minorities and people with disabilities by:
- Enshrine the full right to equal pay for ethnic minorities and people with disabilities in law to make it easier for them to bring claims for unequal pay;
- Mandatory reporting of pay based on race and disability for larger employers (250 or more employees). This will expose any pay gaps and enable companies to consider why such pay gaps exist and how to address them.
comment
The government clearly wants to implement employment reforms quickly, and intends to introduce a labour rights bill within the first 100 days of the new parliament, possibly in mid-October 2024.
The Equality (Race and Disability) Bill is likely to take longer as it is still considered a bill.
While it may take several months before we see either of these bills signed into law (perhaps with some tweaks) and perhaps even longer before any changes are implemented, one thing is certain: we can expect big changes ahead.
The government intends to “work in close partnership with trade unions and business” to deliver the new deal, and we will keep you updated.