Amendments to Employment Rights Bill

Some of the amendments are a result of having rushed to some extent the wording of the Employment Rights Bill, with other amendments coming as a result of the consultations that have been taking place with various stakeholders. There are 222 pages of amendments, and below are the key points from them:

Previously, the right to be offered guaranteed hours was in relation to zero hours and ‘low hours’ workers. The amendment extends this right to agency workers.

Agency workers will also be entitled to reasonable notice of shifts and compensation if shifts are changed at short notice (the definition of which we are still waiting for), with the compensation to be paid in the first instance by the employment agency, who would then be able to recover the compensation from the end user if the change or cancellation was the end user’s responsibility.

A new provision has also been added that will allow a collective agreement between the employer and trade union to contract out of these provisions, but replaces them with something else.

Where employers try to avoid these provisions or find a loophole, there will be a new claim that employees will be able to pursue.

The original bill had proposed to remove the reference to ‘at one establishment’ meaning that if employers were making more than 20 redundancies across the whole organisation in a 90 day period then the obligation to collectively consult would be triggered. This has been amended so that collective consultation will be required where there are 20 or more redundancies at one establishment OR a different threshold is met. Details of what this different threshold will be are still needed, but it is expected to be a percentage of the total workforce or a higher number of redundancies across the whole company.

The compensation for failing to collectively consult (know aa a ‘Protective Award’) is currently 90 days pay per employee. This is being doubled to 180 days per employee.

The proposals relating to SSP have been amended so that those earning below the lower earnings limit will be entitled to SSP at 80% of their average weekly earnings, meaning that all employees will be entitled to some form of SSP and that this will be available as soon as they are absent from work due to illness following the Bill’s previous removal of the three waiting days for SSP.

The amendments introduce the right for mothers and their partners to take two weeks bereavement leave if they suffer a pregnancy loss before 24 weeks, extending the current law on parental bereavement leave, which addresses the loss of a child or a stillbirth after 24 weeks.

It was already expected that the Fair Work Agency would be a more proactive organisation that intervened on behalf of workers, however, they have been given further rights to include:

The amendments are also set to make Carers Leave a paid entitlement in the same way as other statutory leave, but also make ‘caring’ a protected characteristic under the Equality Act, meaning that carers would be protected from being discriminated against for providing or intending to provide care for certain people.

We already know that the intention is to extend the time period to pursue a claim to the Employment Tribunal from 3 – 6 months, but one of the amendments is that claims for sexual harassment would have a time limit of 12 months from the date of the act of sexual harassment the claim relates to.

The amendments include a number of provisions relating to domestic abuse and protection for those subject to domestic abuse, including:

The amendments propose for the current rates of Maternity Pay, Paternity Pay, Adoption Pay, Shared Parental Pay & Parental Bereavement Pay (£184.03) be increased to £368.06 which would be a significant increase.

It has been confirmed that this is not something that will be introduced.