Show notes
A summary of the main changes to UK employment law from April 2024, with a forecast of other upcoming amendments for employers and HR professionals to be aware of. Covering family friendly leave, flexible working, increases to the employment tribunal compensation limits and others.
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Rebecca: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the next edition of the Employment Insights podcast 2024. My name is Rebecca Cairney, and I'm a principal associate in the employment team based in Liverpool.
I'm joined again today by my colleague, Mark Landon, who is a partner based in our London office. Hello, Mark, and thank you for joining us today.
So today, we're gonna do a quick roundup of some of the employment law changes that have come in, recently at the beginning of April, specifically focusing on those family friendly changes that have come in. So what topics are we going to be covering today, please, Mark?
Mark: I think four topics linked to working families. The first is the extension of protection in a redundancy situation or if you like preferential treatment in a redundancy situation, for women who are pregnant or where there's been an adoption or in some cases where there's been shared parental leave. I'm then gonna talk about the changes to the paternity leave rights.
Then I'm gonna look at the introduction of carers' leave. And then finally, I'll just have a quick recap of the changes to the right to request flexible working.
And all of those came in on the sixth of April this year.
Rebecca: So there's been a lot going on.
Mark: Yeah. No. No. There has. And and, you know, as always, I think some of this slips under the radar because it's it's flagged up a long time ahead.
And then I think sometimes people lose sight of the actual date when it becomes law.
So, if I start with redundancy protection, prior to prior to the sixth of April, if a woman on maternity leave found herself at risk of redundancy, So say she was in a pool of employees who were at risk of redundancy.
We know that unfair dismissal law requires that the employer should look at offering suitable alternative employment to at risk people to avoid them being made redundant.
And what the, maternity provision said was that if, for example, you had twenty employees at risk of redundancy and you had three vacant roles, which could be offered to three out of the twenty, if any of those twenty were actually on maternity leave at the moment, that person should be offered one of the vacant roles in priority to the other nineteen people in the pool at risk of redundancy. So provided it was a suitable alternative role, a woman on maternity leave would get preferential treatment as regards being offered that vacant role. Now what happened on the 6 April is that this protection was extended so that in the case of a woman who has a baby, she now gets that preferential treatment throughout the period of her pregnancy and for eighteen months from the date of birth. So if you think about it, under the old regime, the maximum maternity leave you could have was fifty two weeks. So the maximum preferential treatment you could get was for a fifty two week period.
Whereas now, as of the 6 April, a woman at risk of redundancy who is pregnant should get that, prioritization with regard to a vacant role, and, also, she should continue to enjoy that preferential treatment for eighteen months from the date of birth. So whereas before the maximum period of protection was fifty two weeks, it's now nine months pregnancy and eighteen months. So both while you're off on maternity leave and effectively for six months after you return to work.
Now, also, that protection has been extended to women who adopt a child, and the way it works is that that period of protection, that prioritization is for eighteen months from the date of adoption.
And, also, for those taking six or more consecutive weeks of shared parental leave but who have not taken maternity or adoption leave, they get this eighteen month protection again from the date of placement of the, child for adoption or the child's birth. So what you've got is a much longer period of protection and also being extended, to those who are adopting and in certain circumstances, those who are on shared parental leave.
Moving on to paternity leave, prior to the 6 April, you were entitled to one or two weeks paternity leave that you had to take within one block. You couldn't split those up, and you had to take the paternity leave within eight weeks of the birth of the child.
As of the 6 April, you can split up those two weeks. So you can take one week and then separately another week, and you now have a year from the date of the birth rather than eight weeks in which to take the paternity leave.
We've also had the introduction of a new form of leave, which is carers' leave. So as from the 6 April, somebody who is looking after a dependent person will be entitled every year to five days unpaid leave, and you can take that as a block of five days, as a half day, as single days, however you want to do it.
And, essentially, a dependent for the purposes of carers' leave will be someone who is a spouse, civil partner, child, or parent of the employee, someone who lives in the same household as the employee, but not if they are a lodger or a tenant, And you are in need of long you must be in need of long term care.
And that means that you must have an injury or illness, and that could be physical or mental, which is likely to require care for more than three months, or you must be disabled as defined under the Equality Act, or it must be a care reason connected with old age.
So, again, what the take up will be, one doesn't know. It is unpaid leave, but it is, this extra five days, which is available to people with caring responsibilities.
Rebecca: That's good to know, isn't it?
Mark: Yeah. I mean, you know, I I think if you remember, since two thousand and two, there's been a right to take emergency time off to care for the dependent. So if you have a child's taken ill at school or, you know, a a parent who who is falls down the stairs or something like that, Yeah. You can take a reasonable period of time off to and the idea is it it's not to provide long term care. It's to sort out arrangements. Yeah. Take some to hospital, some to look after the child, whatever it happens to be.
Rebecca: I can see this five days, unpaid carers leave being used by people if they want to have a longer period than just the initial twenty four, forty eight hours after an accident or discovering your child's got chickenpox or whatever it want happens to be.
Mark: Yeah. That's the thing.
That flexible working, again, this was flagged up at some length. But what has happened since the sixth of April is that the right to request flexible working has been amended. To begin with, it's a day one right. In other words, on the very first day of employment, you have a right to request flexible working, whereas prior to April, you had to have six months employment before you could make a request under the statutory regime.
Other changes, it used to be prior to April that the employer had three months in which to reach a decision that has been reduced to two months.
And it used to be that you could only make one formal request for flexible working in a twelve month period, and you can now make two requests in a twelve month period. And I think that's a reflection of working life haven't changed post COVID, where I think the government recognizes that often working arrangements are much more fluid, much more liable to change. And therefore, there is this right to make two formal requests in any twelve month period.
The eight business reasons for rejecting a request, things like cost, impact on service disruption, etcetera, they remain as they were before the the sixth of April. So nothing's changed in that regard.
There is now an updated ACAS code of practice, which has been published in support of the right to request. And I think one other significant change is this.
You can't now, as an employer, just reject a request outright. You are meant to sit down and sort of consult with the employee making the request. And if you can't actually accept what they are asking for, the onus is on the employer to come up with a counter proposal, if you like, some sort of a compromise that that might be possible.
So I think in reality, if there is still a good business reason for saying no, then I think the employer will be fine. But, clearly, the onus is really on the employer now to properly consult with the employee.
And I think as always with these things, a lot of it is about being proactive.
Yeah. Periodically, auditing your workforce. How many people already have flexible working? What capacity do you have to accommodate future requests for flexible working? So that when one is made, you're in a better position as the employer to make a sort of well informed decision.
Yeah. And it it's that extra onus on employers, isn't it, to have to consult with other around other options. That's that's that you're right. That's a completely different and and new change, and it is more onerous.
So, yeah, that's absolutely the right advice for people to be a bit more proactive with it behind the scenes if they can be.
Yeah. And I think there's still a bit of a a temptation, a a sort of a knee jerk. What if I give you working. And I think what the law is saying is, look, move away from that very defensive approach to a much more proactive approach. Because if you can find a compromise, you're much more likely to have a productive happy worker than if you've got someone who carries on working under sovereigns or indeed actually decides they've gotta go somewhere else in order to get the pattern of work that they want. Bearing in mind, there are still nine hundred thousand unfilled jobs in the UK.
I I guess just to finish, Rebecca, I ought to mention some other things, either that happened on the sixth of April or in the offing.
One is the annual increase to employment tribunal compensation limits.
I think, for an unfair dismissal award now, the maximum compensatory award, will increase from just over a hundred and five thousand pounds to just over a hundred and fifteen thousand pounds. And the limit on the week's pay increases from six hundred and forty three pounds to seven hundred pounds.
I mean, what that means is that the minimum basic award for things like breaches of health and safety, will go up to just over eight and a half thousand pounds. And, you know, even if there's no discrimination involved, the fact that someone now could potentially win over a hundred thousand pounds in compensation, remembering, of course, it's the lower of that or or their annual pay. I mean, that is that is quite significant.
I think linked to that, the, injury to feelings awards that you can get in the event of a finding of discrimination have increased.
If you remember, there are three bands, depending upon the severity of the act of discrimination, and it starts or it used to start at twelve hundred pounds, and, it used to go up to fifty six thousand two hundred. And in fact, now those injury to feelings awards, will start at eleven thousand seven hundred pounds and go up to fifty eight thousand seven hundred pounds for the really most extreme forms of discrimination. So, again, remember that those are additional awards. They're not dependent upon a loss of money. They're not compensatory.
They are an award for injury to feelings, and that's quite a significant sum of money if the tribunal felt that an employer, for example, had acted very maliciously in a predetermined way and so on and so forth.
Other things coming in and and going back to family related law, in April twenty twenty five, we can expect child under twenty eight days old that needs hospitalization for seven days or more, however long your child spends in hospital will be added on your maternity, or adoption or shared parental leave up to twelve weeks. So if you had a child who was, in an incubator for five weeks, what the, neonatal care law will say is that if you're a mom taking maternity leave, well, your fifty two weeks maternity leave will have an additional five weeks added on at the end to reflect the period of time that the child spent in hospital. So that's something that's coming in in a year from now.
A couple of things finally, just to flag up for, the summer and September. This summer, we're going to get a new code of practice around dismissal and reengagement. That's really prompted by by the P&O ferry saga, two or three years ago, where they just basically sacked everybody, and paid them the punitive damages because it was, you know, still worked out a lot cheaper for P&O ferries in the long term.
And, essentially, the whole it what it did, it it brought into focus the whole fire and rehire ethos. The idea that if I want to ultimately force through a contractual change, my ultimate option is to serve notice to terminate the current employment contract and then offer to reengage someone on the new terms and conditions.
The government have not outlawed firing rehire. What you've got with the dismissal and reengagement code of practice is about fourteen pages extolling employers not to do it, but then at the end saying, well, actually, if you must do it, then this is what you'd expect to do by way of notification and so on and so forth. So, you know, I I think in truth, that goes some way short of what Labour have promised to do, if they, come to to power.
I think I think I'll stop there because I think that really covers the main things that that that are on the horizon, but I hope that's been a a helpful, summary of what's going on.
Rebecca: Yep. Absolutely. And, the there's there's loads going on this year, isn't there, having as we've already heard and and what's also coming up, for the remainder of the year. So yeah. Absolutely. We'll we'll we'll keep an ear out, everybody for the other employment, law updates, by subscribing to the podcast. It's the Employment Law Insights podcast.
But if you do need any assistance at all with anything either within this podcast or employment law related, then please either contact myself, rebecca dot kernie at waitmans dot com or Mark on mark dot landon at waitmans dot com. And thanks again, Mark, for for providing us with the that helpful summary of updates that have been, have have been implemented and, are upcoming.