Key amendments to the Employment Rights Bill for recruiters to consider

This is a guest blog by business partner JMW.

An Amendment Paper for the Employment Rights Bill (“the Bill”) was published on 27 November 2024. The proposed amendments will be considered by the Public Bill Committee. In this blog, we will concentrate on the key proposals in the Amendment Paper that could affect the recruitment sector.

“Initial information period” relating to guaranteed hours

The Bill proposed if a worker is under a zero-hours or minimum hours contract, the employer has an obligation to offer a “guaranteed hours contract”. The “guaranteed hours contract” will be based on the number of hours the worker worked during the previous “reference period”.

The Amendment Paper proposes to place a duty on employers to “ensure workers who have the potential to qualify for a guaranteed hours offer are aware of, and continue to have access to, certain information”. This information should be provided to workers who could reasonably be considered to be qualifying workers in any reference period.

In this scenario, we note the agency may act as the employer of the temporary worker in question. Therefore, the duty to ensure workers who could be considered to qualify for a guaranteed hours contract have access to certain information may fall on the recruitment agency. We await clarity from the Government on this point.

The content of “certain information” for the purposes of this duty is unclear at present and shall be specified in upcoming regulations. We expect the information will need to brief workers about their rights to be offered guaranteed hours and notify them of any exceptions.

This amendment suggests the duty on employers to provide information to potentially qualifying workers should be ongoing. The Amendment Paper states that once the “initial information period” ends, the worker should continue to have access to the specified information providing they are still employed and it could reasonably be considered that they might become a qualifying worker.

The proposed “initial information period” is 2 weeks starting from either:

• The worker's first day of service.
• The date it is reasonable to consider they could become a qualifying worker.
•  The day the provision comes into force if a qualifying worker is already contracted on that date.

Increasing time limits to bring tribunal claims

The Government has proposed to increase the statutory time limit to bring all tribunal claims from 3 to 6 months. This will apply to all types of claims including those relating to discrimination.

The Labour Party said they planned to extend the time limits in such a way in the ‘Plan to Make Work Pay’ so we anticipated this proposal would have been included in the Bill. To much surprise it was not, however we now see it by way of an amendment.

Other key amendments

• Extension of Statutory Sick Pay provisions under the Bill to Northern Ireland, ensuring a unified approach to sick pay across the UK.

• Requirement for employers to include an explanation in their annual equality action plans how they are supporting workers experiencing menstrual problems/disorders.