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Introduction

The Employment Rights Bill has completed its long journey through Parliament and has become the Employment Rights Act 2025.  But the story is far from over.  

We have written extensively about the Employment Rights Bill as it developed (see our initial analysis here and our update on the amendments here). Now that the Act has received Royal Assent, this article focuses on the practical implementation challenges facing both government and employers in the coming months and years.

The Government's modification of the unfair dismissal qualifying period — no now requiring six months rather than day-one protection — illustrates the tension between ambitious policy objectives and practical implementation realities. Yet this concession addressed only one dimension of a far broader implementation challenge.

The Act introduces the most significant overhaul of UK employment law in decades. We have covered the detail of the Act's provisions in our earlier articles, but the key changes include: a six-month qualifying period for unfair dismissal protection (replacing the previously signalled day-one model); extensive new rights for zero-hours and low-hours workers; modernised trade union access and recognition processes; strengthened pregnancy and family-leave protections; expanded collective redundancy duties; new constraints on "fire and rehire" practices; and extended time limits for many claims from three to six months.

The primary implementation risks arise from:

  • extraordinarily high legal and operational complexity, particularly in the third party harassment, zero-hours workers and shift regimes;
  • onerous recurring obligations that smaller employers may struggle to observe;
  • staffing constraints and a real risk of claims from shift-notice provisions;
  • tribunal capacity constraints exacerbated by doubled limitation periods; and
  • industrial relations strain from union access and recognition rules.

The Government has opened multiple consultations and signalled further secondary legislation to specify key definitions, timeframes, compensation bands, and sectoral exemptions. Much of the detail that will make the Act workable in practice remains to be determined.  We set out below key areas where we have identified particular issues relating to the implementation or unintended consequences of the new legislation.

Timeline

Employment Rights Bill: Timeline