Various provisions included in the Employment Rights Act 2025 will need secondary legislation to bring them fully into force. To proceed, the Government has launched two consultations, applying to England, Scotland and Wales, to seek comments on the details in two specific areas.
The first of these concerns the types of detriments that employers should be prohibited from imposing on workers for taking industrial action. The consultation invites views from trade unions, employers, workers and other interested parties on what those prohibited detriments should be.
The Department for Business and Trade states: “We understand that all interested parties will want clarity on the law in this area as soon as possible. The Government will consider all consultation responses with a view to bringing forward the resulting secondary legislation by October 2026.” The deadline for submitting comments is 23 April 2026.
The second consultation concerns the levels and methods by which the new organisation-wide threshold for triggering collective redundancy obligations might be set. The Government is considering two options: using a single fixed number in the range of 250 to 1000 or tiering this new obligation based on number of employees.
With responses sought by 21 May 2026, this consultation notes that employers are currently required to undertake collective redundancy obligations only when making 20 or more redundancies at one establishment. This has led to situations where large numbers of employees at an organisation are not being consulted because the redundancies are spread across multiple sites below the current threshold.
The practical impact of this move is likely that more employers will fall within the extended scope of the collective redundancy rules.
