The Employment Rights Bill has passed. Take a breath – we’ve got this.

After months (and months… and then some more months) of back-and-forth between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the Employment Rights Bill (ERB) has finally made it through Parliament.

It is now awaiting Royal Assent, which is widely expected before Christmas, at which point it will officially become law as the Employment Rights Act 2025.

There’s no need to panic, the passing of the ERB is not the moment everything suddenly changes overnight as various parts of the Act will be introduced over the next year or two and there are a number of consultations involved in the implementation of some of those.

What we can confidently say is that this will affect EVERY SINGLE employer to some degree and across many areas of the employee lifecycle so now we begin the job of talking about “what next”. Additional complexities, probably a whole load of admin and paperwork and definitely increased risks that are going to need preparing for, managing and mitigating so let’s talk about what this really means in practice.

When is all of this actually going to happen?

Some trade union law changes will kick in straight away or within two months – we’re not going to go into detail about that here but please get in touch if you think this will effect you.

Most changes will be introduced via regulations across 2026 and 2027, following consultation. Some of the more complex reforms (such as zero-hour contracts and unfair dismissal changes) are currently expected to take effect from 1 January 2027.

Timings may shift. This is employment law. It always does.

So… what are the key changes employers need to know about now?

Here’s the high-level picture

In April 2026

Statutory sick pay is payable from day one and extended to lower earners. We’ve mentioned it many times before but if you do not have a robust policy and process for managing sickness now is the time to start.

Paternity Leave becomes a day one right with the removal of the qualifying period.

Collective redundancy protective awards will be doubled if you fail to consult when making 20+ redundancies across the entire business not just per location.

Although it’s not happening until January 2027, the issue we have discussed the most is the reduced qualifying period of 6 months (down from 2 years) for employees who want to make a claim of unfair dismissal.  Alongside this comes with the removal of the compensation cap for unfair dismissal (which is currently the lower of 52 weeks’ pay or £118,223).

This means if you employ someone on 1 July 2026 and they turn out to not be right for your business you will need to have dismissed them by 31 December to avoid the risk of an unfair dismissal claim at tribunal.  Actually for reasons too complicated to explain today they’d need to be dismissed by approximately 23 December 2026 which means you’d need to give them notice by maybe 23 November which means you probably need to start considering the options mid November…so just 4 or so months after they joined you.

Compare that to now when you have almost two years to make your mind up about an employee relatively risk free.

So you have less time to decide and the cost risks are potentially much higher.

And it’s all happening much sooner than expected as it is likely to start affecting people you employ in 2026 so managing your employees’ probationary periods and initial employment is something you must start to prioritise. We have designed a probation plan that will ensure everything is well-managed and documented from day one so that should you decide a new employee is not working out you will be able to evidence your decision making.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the time limit for early conciliation with ACAS increased on 1 December 2025 from 6 to 12 weeks and the ERB proposal to increase the Employment Tribunal time limits for filing a claim from 3 to 6 months means that there is a possible 9 month period of uncertainty about whether there may be any claims made against the business after an employment issue.

We’re keeping our eye on the government roadmap for the implementation of all the changes, with keen attention on the above and the other areas such as NDAs, whistleblowing, a strengthened duty to prevent sexual harassment, rules around zero hours contracts and the “ban” on fire and rehire.

We want you to know we are thinking about the “what next”, not “panic now”.

At vivoHR, our role is to:

• Understand what’s coming and when
• Separate what’s urgent from what can wait
• Translate legislation into practical, sensible actions
• Help you prepare, manage and mitigate risk without overengineering your business

We promise no knee-jerk unnecessary policy rewrites and absolutely no scaremongering – but don’t be tempted to just ignore what’s happening. This is the biggest shake-up of employment rights in years.

If you’re a vivoHR client, this is exactly what your ongoing support is there for – we will be updating you directly in January.

If you’re not (yet), now is a very sensible time to get proper advice so give us a call.