Flexible working ‘default from day one’ confirmed in King’s Speech

The King’s Speech last week outlined the key employment law reforms expected to be introduced within the first 100 days of the new Labour’s Government. The King said his government would “legislate to introduce a new deal for working people to ban exploitative practices and enhance employment rights.” The measures will be introduced in a new Employment Rights Bill.

Labour's ‘Plan to Make Work Pay’ and its Manifesto contained a significant number of employment law reforms which have been covered extensively in the HR press. The details will emerge in the coming weeks when the government publishes a draft bill. Some of the planned reforms will happen quite quickly while others will be subject to a period of consultation meaning legislation will not appear until well into next year. Nonetheless, we have a good idea of what’s coming and employers would do well to get ready for it now. 

To that end, in the weeks following Rishi Sunak’s calling of the General Election on 4 July, we ran a series of webinars to help HR professionals and businesses prepare for what might lie ahead. Those Election Specials covered three key areas, namely:

- Worker status, protection, and rights

- Equality and family friendly laws; and

- Industrial relations and trade unions

In this programme we will take a look at Labour’s plans on equality and family friendly laws. Our Head of Client Training Trish Embley hosted the webinars and earlier she joined my by video-link to discuss it: 

Trish Embley: “The main headline was around flexible working. So at the moment, as we know, everyone's got the right to request flexible working but, of course, the employer can reject it on one of eight statutory grounds and there's no real mechanism for scrutinizing that rejection. It's got to be that process and here we've chosen one of these eight grounds. Labour are saying flexible working will become the sort of default right unless it's just not feasible to offer it. So again, that's where we're going to wait to see what's the fine detail of what's not feasible. Interesting one, may require a bit of a cultural change in a lot of organizations to really embrace day one flexible working. So we posed the question and we said do you think this is going to be an incredible burden and increase costs? The polls were really quite close. So we had just 52% saying yes to that, but 48% answering the question that said, or do you think this is a really good way to retain people who might otherwise lose you because of their caring responsibilities or ill health and, as I say, 48% answered saying that was their preferred response.”

Joe Glavina: “You also covered changes to pay gap reporting, Trish. What’s Labour planning to do?”

Trish Embley: “So at the moment, are larger employers, 250 employees plus, they're used to publishing on a government portal, on their websites, their gender pay gap. The Labour government are saying, well, that's not going to be enough, you've also got to now publish the action plans that you're going to put in place to address those gender pay gaps because it's one thing telling us what the problem is but you've actually got to show us what you're doing. Added to that, those larger employers are going to now have to report on both their ethnicity and their disability pay gap reporting. Now, that's more challenging because if we take ethnicity, it's not like gender, there's a broad range of different ethnicities that you'd have to report on and with disability, unfortunately, there still is that reluctance to disclose disability. So trying to get the data for both of these new sets of reporting requirements is going to be a challenge for clients and businesses and they're really going to have to look at their D&I strategy and their comms around gathering in this data as well.”

Joe Glavina: “Disability and ethnicity reporting are not mandatory at the moment. Will Labour change that?”

Trish Embley: “So, yes, the ethnicity and the disability pay gap reporting will become mandatory. Again, we asked attendees what they were doing and a surprisingly high number, 41% , of those that responded said that they were already voluntarily disclosing their ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting and that's what we do Pinsent Masons as well. We are reporting on both of those things voluntarily.”
Joe Glavina: “So is your message to firms who are not yet voluntarily reporting to start down that road now?” 

Trish Embley: “Oh, yes, I think it would be very wise to start some process now around how you're going to gather in that data and that's something that our equality law team have got great expertise in because, as I said, it is about getting your communication strategy right, telling people why you want this data, and making sure that you get the sort of response rate that will give you some data that is actually of use.”

The recordings of all three of those Election Special webinars are available to listen to in full if you are interested. We’ve included links to them in the transcript of this programme. Last week we covered session 1, Labour’s plans for changing worker status and improving workers’ rights and that programme is available now for viewing from the Out-Law website. Next time we’ll look at industrial relations and trade unions, so do join us again for that.

LINKS
- Link to Election Special webinars audio recordings
1 Worker status, protection, and rights
2 Equality and family friendly laws
3 Industrial relations and trade unions