Uncategorised Gear Up For The Race! Spotlight HR’s 2024 Election Special


Uncover the Key Election Reforms Shaping SME Decisions

By Kimberly Bradshaw (CEO, Spotlight HR)

June 2024.

With Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s call for a July 4th General Election, the race for 10 Downing Street is on! This special edition delves into the employment laws and workplace reforms being put forward.

We are not taking sides or being political, we are just updating you on what might happen depending on who wins the vote.  We’ve kept things simple so you can easily navigate the information and identify the changes that might most impact your business. Regardless of who wins, stay informed and stay ahead!

What’s the 2024 Labour promise for businesses?

At the time of writing, Labour is billed as the election frontrunner, with the media talking about a landslide victory larger than Blair’s 1997 sweep. Putting the polls aside, let us examine the nuts and bolts of Labour’s proposed reforms as outlined in their manifesto so you can decide if they cut the mustard.

Item by item – Labour’s proposed 2024 workplace reforms:

Day-One Rights: Eliminate qualifying periods for basic rights like unfair dismissal, sick pay, and parental leave from day one of employment.

Enforcement Rights: Extend tribunal claim time limit to six months.

Unified Worker Status: Ensure all workers receive the same rights and protections, eliminating distinctions between employees and workers.

Self-Employment: Provide self-employed individuals a right to a written contract.

Raise Wages: Remove national minimum age-based wage bands, ensure paid travel time, address “sleepover” hours in social care, and ban unpaid internships.

Sick Pay: Strengthen Statutory Sick Pay to cover all workers immediately, remove the waiting period and ensure rate represents fair earnings replacement.

Close Pay Gaps: Mandate the publication of ethnicity and disability pay gaps for firms with over 250 employees.

Tackle Harassment: Enforce harassment-free workplaces, including protection from third-party harassment.

Flexible Working: Default to flexible working from day one unless infeasible.

Family-Friendly Policies: Grant parental leave from day one, introduce bereavement leave, and protect pregnant employees from dismissal for six months after maternity leave, with limited exceptions.

Caring Responsibilities: Review and consider paid carer’s leave.

Zero-hours Contracts: These will be banned.

Contract Statements:

  • Those working regular hours for 12 weeks or more will have the right to a regular contract to reflect hours worked.
  • Everyone will have access to the full set of employment rights and these will be freely available to workers

Fire and Re-Hire: Enhance consultation, improve the Code of Practice and prevent dismissal when contract changes are rejected.

Menopause: Require large employers to implement Menopause Action Plans.

Right to Disconnect: Employees will have the right to disconnect – meaning employers cannot contact staff outside of working hours

Trade Union membership:  Employers to inform employees in the contract statement of right to join a trade union.

Shift working:  Workers to get reasonable notice of any change in shifts or working time and recompense for cancelled shifts

Your Spotlight HR summary: From various day-one employee rights changes to unified worker status, they propose better sick pay, flexible working and enhanced worker protections. With “Make Work Pay: Delivering a New Deal for Working People,” Labour prioritises improved employee rights and well-being.

Are you looking for straightforward, Award-Winning HR advice? Let’s chat.

 

What’s the 2024 Conservative promise for businesses?

The Conservatives are set to roll out their ongoing agenda as the reigning party. Under their leadership, 2024 has already been a whirlwind of workplace reform, with a staggering 10 new employment laws already in play and more on the horizon pending re-election. We have distilled their current policies and future reform debates into easy-to-digest bullet points.

Current Conservative policies:

National Living Wage (NLW): Increase NLW to around £13 per hour by the end of next Parliament.

Migration: Introduce a legal cap on migration that will reduce every year. Increase visa fees and require migrants to have health checks.

Apprenticeships: Create 100,000 more apprenticeships by the end of the next Parliament.

Neonatal care leave and pay: Provide additional pay and leave to parents caring for children.

Reform of industrial action laws: Restrictive laws introduced, outlining how and when trade unions and their members can take industrial action.

Launched reform of fit notes as part of their Back to Work Plan: Re-examine people’s ongoing exclusion from work for health reasons to keep more of them in employment.

Reform of umbrella company market: Regulate the payment of temporary workers by intermediary companies.

Continue with the National Disability Strategy: Support disabled people to enter the workforce.

Defining “sex” in the Equality Act 2010: Identify a person by the gender recorded on their birth certificate.

Re-introduction of employment tribunal fees: A flat £55 tribunal fee from November 2024.

Reform of non-compete clauses: Limit to three months on all employment contracts.

Proposed reform to TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings/Protection of Employment): Protect employees impacted by business restructuring.

Right to paternity leave after bereavement: Give working fathers and non-birthing partners automatic rights to immediate paternity leave if the mother dies.

Conservative bills under debate:

Bullying and Respect at Work Bill: Introduce a legal definition of workplace bullying.

Fertility Treatment (Employment Rights) Bill: Entitlement for paid leave to attend fertility treatment appointments.

Unpaid Trial Work Periods (Prohibition) Bill: Prohibit unpaid work experience over four weeks, with the national minimum wage paid thereafter.

Your Spotlight HR summary: The current Conservative agenda focuses on various employee and employer reforms, including neonatal care leave, industrial action laws, fit notes, umbrella company reform and the National Disability Strategy. Key future bills include workplace bullying, fertility treatment rights and redefining “sex” in the Equality Act 2010.

Are you looking for straightforward, Award-Winning HR advice? Let’s chat.

What’s the 2024 Liberal Democrats promise for businesses?

The Lib Dem’s workplace reform centres around working rights for parents, with the breakdown looking like this:

Employee status: Establish a new ‘dependent contractor’ status in between employment and self-employment with entitlements to certain basic rights.

Employment Tribunals: Make changes requiring employers to have to prove employee status rather than the individual.

National Minimum Wage:

  • Introduce new bands for care workers and those on zero-hours contracts: remove apprentice rate.
  • Hold an independent review that will recommend a genuine living wage.

Statutory Sick Pay: Remove the lower earnings limit and waiting days so that SSP is paid from the first day of absence. Align SSP rate with NMW rate.

Flexible Working: Give everyone the right to flexible working and give disabled workers the right to work from home unless there are significant business reasons that make this not possible.

Parental Leave reform: Give all workers, including self-employed parents, a day one right to parental leave and pay.

Family Friendly: 

  • Increase paternity pay to 90% of earnings, with a cap for high earners.
  • Double the rate of statutory maternity pay and shared parental pay to £350 per week
  • Introduce a month of “use it or lose it” leave for fathers and partners paid at 90% of earnings, capped for higher earners, eventually increasing to six weeks.
  • Provide 46 weeks of parental leave to share, paid at double the current statutory rate
  • Introduce paid neonatal care leave
  • Large employers to publish their parental leave and pay policies.

Carer’s Leave:  Introduce paid Carer’s leave.

Zero-hours:  Introduce the right to request a fixed-hours contract after 12 months which is not to be unreasonably refused.

Equality Act:  Make care-related duties and care experience a protected characteristic.

Disabled employees: Introduce “Adjustment Passports” to record the adjustments, modifications and equipment a disabled person has received and ensure that support and equipment stays with the person if they change jobs.

Other Proposals:

  • Large employers to monitor and publish data on gender, ethnicity, disability and LGBT+ employment levels, pay gaps and progression and publish five-year aspirational targets
  • Replace salary threshold visa scheme with a merit-based system
  • Exempt NHS and care staff from the present immigration skills charge
  • Replace apprenticeship levy with skills and training levy
  • Give staff in listed companies with more than 250 employees the right to request shares
  • Require large employers to have a formal statement of purpose including employee welfare
  • Establish a Worker Protection Enforcement Authority to enforce, minimum wage, tackling modern slavery and protecting agency workers.

Your Spotlight HR summary: As detailed above, supporting working parents is part of the Lib Dem key election focus for workplace reform.

Are you looking for straightforward, Award-Winning HR advice? Let’s chat.

What’s the 2024 Reform UK promise for businesses?

The key policies affecting employment are:

Immigration:  Freeze non-essential immigration: exceptions for working in healthcare where essential.

Small businesses: A pledge of big tax cuts for small businesses which would include corporation tax, increase in VAT threshold and abolition of business rates for high street small businesses.

 

Are you looking for straightforward, Award-Winning HR advice? Let’s chat.

Embrace the Future with Confidence

As the July 4th election draws near, businesses are brimming with anticipation and uncertainty. Fear not! Spotlight HR stands ready to guide you. With over 50 years of expertise in Employment Law, trust us to steer you through any political shifts, ensuring a smooth and prosperous journey through evolving workplace landscapes.

GOOD LUCK VOTING EVERYONE!

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