The Employment Rights Bill: What HR Should Update First

For most HR leads, the Employment Rights Bill is no longer a policy abstraction. It is a queue of contract templates to rewrite, a probation framework to rethink, and a set of rostering practices that — in their current form — will not survive the transition. The Bill represents the most substantial recalibration of UK employment law in a generation, and while implementation will be staged rather than instantaneous, the work of preparing for it is not.

This piece sets out, in practical terms, what the Bill changes across three of the most discussed areas — day-one rights, the unfair dismissal qualifying period, and zero-hours contracts — and where HR teams should be directing attention first.

Day-one rights: the centre of gravity shifts

The Bill's headline move is the conversion of several rights that previously depended on length of service into rights that attach from the first day of employment. The direction of travel has been clear for some time, but the Bill consolidates it.

In practice, this means employers can no longer treat the early months of employment as a regulatory grace period. The protections employees acquire on day one will sit alongside existing day-one rights — such as protection against discrimination — and will shape how recruitment, onboarding, probation and early-stage performance management should be designed.

Two consequences follow. First, the quality of hiring decisions becomes more consequential, because the cost of correcting a poor hire rises. Second, probation processes need to be documented, structured and defensible from the outset, rather than retrofitted when problems emerge.

The unfair dismissal qualifying period

Perhaps the single change with the largest cultural impact is the removal of the two-year qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal claims. Under the existing regime, most employees needed two years of continuous service before they could bring such a claim. The Bill moves towards unfair dismissal protection from the start of employment, subject to a statutory probationary or initial period during which a lighter-touch process is expected to apply.

The detail of how that initial period will operate — its length, the procedural standards required, and the interaction with contractual probation — is being developed through consultation and secondary legislation. HR teams should not wait for the final wording before acting. The structural shift is clear: dismissal during early employment will require a documented, fair process, even if a streamlined one.

Areas to revisit:

• Probation policy. Length, review cadence, written feedback, and the criteria for confirmation or extension.
• Manager training. Line managers will need to understand that "they're still on probation" is no longer a complete answer.
• Dismissal authorisation. Who signs off, what evidence is required, and how it is recorded.
• Settlement and exit practice. Expect more scrutiny of early terminations and more appetite to challenge them.

Zero-hours contracts: from flexibility to predictability

The Bill does not abolish zero-hours contracts, but it does substantially narrow the conditions under which a true zero-hours relationship can be maintained without offering the worker an alternative. The core mechanisms expected are:

1. A right to guaranteed hours reflecting hours regularly worked over a reference period, offered to qualifying workers.
2. A right to reasonable notice of shifts, including changes and cancellations.
3. Compensation for shifts cancelled or curtailed at short notice, the detail of which will be set out in regulations.
4. Extension of these protections to agency workers in substance, so that the framework cannot be sidestepped by routing engagement through an intermediary.

For sectors that have built operating models around large casual pools — hospitality, retail, logistics, care, higher education — this is a structural change rather than a tweak. Forecasting, rostering and payroll systems will need to handle reference-period calculations and short-notice cancellation payments. Contracts will need rewriting. The economics of "just-in-case" labour will shift.

What to update first

A reasonable order of priorities for an HR function in 2025, ahead of the Bill's staged commencement:

1. Map your population. Identify how many workers are on zero-hours or low-hours arrangements, how many are in their first two years of service, and which line managers are responsible for them.
2. Refresh contract templates. Employment contracts, casual worker agreements and agency terms will all need attention. Build flexibility into the templates so secondary legislation can be absorbed without a second rewrite.
3. Rebuild probation. Treat the initial period as a formal regulated phase, not an informal one. Define review points, evidence standards and decision authorities.
4. Train line managers. The single largest source of litigation risk under the new regime will be informal early dismissals handled by managers who have not adjusted their habits.
5. Audit rostering practice. Where short-notice changes are routine, model the cost of compensation obligations and decide whether the operating model needs to change before the law does.
6. Coordinate with payroll and HRIS. Reference-period calculations, guaranteed-hours offers and cancellation payments need system support; this is rarely a quick configuration change.

The wider shift

It is tempting to read the Bill as a list of discrete reforms. It is more usefully read as a single shift in the default assumption of UK employment law 2026: the employee is treated as protected from the start, and the employer carries the burden of designing fair processes from day one. The Bill does not remove the employer's ability to manage performance, end employment, or use flexible labour. It does require that each of these be done with more structure and more evidence than has historically been the norm.

HR functions that begin the redesign work now — particularly on probation, contracts and manager capability — will find the transition manageable. Those that wait for the commencement dates will find themselves rewriting policy under operational pressure.

For UK employers with cross-border workforces, Serene Jade's legal services include UK-qualified solicitor consultations on contract redesign, probation frameworks and sponsor-licence compliance under the new regime.

FAQ

Q: Does the Bill mean we cannot dismiss anyone during probation? A: No. A statutory initial period is expected to allow a lighter-touch process for early dismissals, but the process will still need to be fair and documented. Informal, undocumented terminations during probation will carry materially more risk than they do today.

Q: Do we have to offer guaranteed hours to every zero-hours worker? A: The right is expected to apply to workers whose actual hours over a reference period demonstrate a regular pattern. Genuinely irregular, occasional work is treated differently, but the threshold and mechanics will be set out in regulations, so contract drafting should anticipate both outcomes.

Q: When do the changes actually take effect? A: Commencement is staged and several elements depend on secondary legislation and consultation. The realistic planning horizon for most substantive changes is 2026 onwards, but contract, policy and system work should be underway well before then to avoid a compressed implementation.