King's Speech 2024 - Employment Rights Bill

Employment Rights Bill

“My Government is committed to making work pay and will legislate to introduce a new deal for working people to ban exploitative practices and enhance employment rights”

• This Government's Plan to Make Work Pay will create a new partnership between business, trade unions and working people and is fundamental to our growth mission. The Employment Rights Bill, to be introduced within the first one hundred days, is a significant step towards delivering this ambition and represents the biggest upgrade to workers' rights in a generation.

• In addition to this Bill, we will deliver a genuine living wage that accounts for the cost of living and we will remove the discriminatory age bands to ensure every adult worker benefits. These changes will improve the lives of working people across the country.

• We will work in close partnership with trade unions and business to deliver our New Deal and invite their views on how best we can put our plans into practice. 

What does the Bill do? 

• The Government is committed to delivering its New Deal for Working People in full. The Bill will deliver on policies as set out in the Plan to Make Work Pay that require primary legislation to implement. The Plan includes commitments to the following: 

Territorial extent and application 

• The Bill will extend and apply to Great Britain. 

Key facts

• The UK typically ranks highly in international indicators of labour market flexibility and there are around 4 million more people in work than in 2010. However, there has also been an increase in the number of people in less secure forms of work, including the number of zero hours contracts rising to over 1 million over the last decade. The Bill will provide additional security and predictability for these workers. 
• Extending protections to workers from day one will encourage more workers to switch jobs, which is associated with higher wages and productivity growth. Wage rises are around usually three-times higher for those who move jobs compared to those who do not.

• High employment and low unemployment have not coincided with increasing productivity, or wages. UK productivity growth since the global financial crisis has been slow, and lower than the G7 average.  

• The UK typically ranks highly in international indicators of labour market flexibility and there are ​​​around 4 million more people in work than in 2010. However, there has also been an increase in the number of people in less secure forms of work, including the number of zero hours contracts rising to over 1 million over the last decade. The Bill will provide additional security and predictability for these workers.

• Real wage growth has been flat, with real average weekly earnings only just returning to 2008 levels. Much of our recent economic growth has come from growth in the size of the labour market itself (e.g. through increased migration), while GDP per capita has flatlined.  

• The Bill will help to ensure industrial relations are based around good faith negotiation and bargaining with the Government committed to implementing a genuine living wage for workers.

• The number of workers inactive due to long-term sickness is at a historic high (around 2.8 million). Statutory Sick Pay is complex, outdated and fails to adequately support those who need it. Currently 1.5m people earn below the lower earnings limit (£123 per week) and people do not currently receive any payment for the first three days of a sickness absence, disproportionately affecting the lowest paid workers working part time, or in low paid multiple jobs. 

• The national gender pay gap still stands at 14.3 per cent. There are effective actions employers could be taking but in 2018/19 only an estimated 52 per cent of employers published an action plan. One in ten women who worked during the menopause have left a job due to their symptoms. In addition, a quarter of reported sexual harassment in England and Wales takes place at work.