Employment Rights Act 2025: Next Steps for Businesses Webinar

This morning we teamed up with Team Lincolnshire to walk business owners and Team Lincolnshire members through one of the biggest changes to UK employment law in a generation: the Employment Rights Act 2025. Thank you to everyone who joined us and to Team Lincolnshire for facilitating the webinar.

If you couldn't make it, or want a reminder of where things stand, here's a recap of what we covered and the practical next steps.

Employment Rights Act 2025: Where Things Stand Right Now

A good deal of the Act is already in force. Since 6 April 2026, employees have had the right to Statutory Sick Pay from day one, with the old three-day waiting period and lower earnings limit both scrapped. Paternity leave and unpaid parental leave became day-one rights too, alongside a new right to bereaved partner's paternity leave. On the enforcement side, the maximum protective award for getting collective redundancy consultation wrong doubled to 180 days' pay, sexual harassment reports now count as protected whistleblowing disclosures and the new Fair Work Agency is up and running with real investigatory powers.

Our message to the room this morning: if your policies and payroll haven't been checked against these changes yet, that's the first job.

What's Still Ahead for Employers

October provides big updates for the Employment Rights Act 2025 timeline. On 1 October 2026, the time limit for bringing most Employment Tribunal claims doubles from three to six months. On 30 October the duty to prevent sexual harassment gets tougher, moving from "reasonable steps" to "all reasonable steps" with a new duty covering harassment by customers and contractors too.

Then comes 1 January 2027, the date we spent the most time on. From this point, the unfair dismissal qualifying period drops from two years to just six months and the cap on compensation disappears entirely. At the same time, restrictions on "fire and rehire" mean dismissing someone to force through a contract change becomes automatically unfair from day one of their employment, in almost all circumstances. Together, these two changes fundamentally alter the risk analysis behind every dismissal decision a business makes.

Employment Rights Act 2025: Key Next Steps for Businesses

The question we came back to throughout the session was simple: what should businesses actually do about all this? We left attendees with an action plan, which you'll find set out in the graphic below — but in summary, the priorities are:

In September: audit your contracts, policies and probation periods against the changes above, confirm your payroll is correctly processing day-one SSP and family leave and refresh your sexual harassment risk assessment.

In October & November: redraft probation clauses so they run to around three to four months with a workable extension option — the goal is to have made your decision well before the new six-month qualifying period closes. Update your whistleblowing, grievance and harassment policies, and brief your line managers on documentation habits and day-one rights.

December onwards: review any contract clauses you rely on to vary pay, hours or shift patterns, get proper manager training in place on probation and performance management, and set a formal review point ahead of the October 2026 and January 2027 go-live dates.

Impact

Since May we've been helping businesses with three main areas:

1. Reviewing contracts and policies - get your foundations fit, ready and legally compliant.

2. Carrying out harassment training for businesses and line managers. We could into your business to deliver practical training including looking at your organisational risk assessment. These are key steps to show you have taken "all reasonable steps" to prevent harassment.

3. Providing commercial advice on any Employment Rights Act risk areas in your business to address. Use our Employment Rights Act health check to help you with this: Employment Rights Act 2025 Health Check | Impact Employment Law

If this recap has raised questions specific to your business, that's exactly what we're here for. Get in touch with the Oliver Tasker, and we'll help you turn this into a plan that actually fits how you operate.

Contact Oliver Tasker if you want to discuss:

📞 Call: 01522 776270 ✉️ Email: oliver@impactemploymentlaw.co.uk

Thank you again to Team Lincolnshire for hosting us.

Impact Employment Law Limited, Advice. Protection. Impact.