Alongside the usual increases to national minimum wage and national living wage, employment law is seeing changes in 2023 that both employers and employees need to be aware of, so we’ve highlighted a few key ones:
Tip Allocation Bill
It’s long been a bone of contention that some staff in the service sector don’t receive all the tips that customers give. That led to National Minimum Wage legislation in 1999 preventing employers from raiding tips to make up the NMW.
The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 goes further. It will likely come into practice in 2024, once the Government have written a code of practice for it.
This will stop employers in businesses where tipping is commonplace from taking money from service charges and gratuities and require them be distributed fairly. The Act gives us some what of an idea of what will be included in the code of practice:
- it will set out what ‘qualifying tips’ are;
- when tips are paid- no later then the end of the next month;
- some employers will need to have a written policy on how to deal with tips.
Fire and re-hire – new Code
‘Fire and re-hire’ is a term used when an employer wants to change their employees’ contract, and will dismiss anyone who doesn’t comply with the new terms. The employer will either hire them back, engaging the new terms, or dismiss and hire new staff who are prepared to accept the new contracts.
Employers doing this must follow a consultation process and they face losing unfair dismissal claims if the changes to terms are too significant, especially if they don’t obtain employee buy-in.
Citing the P&O story a new Code of Practice will come into force. It doesn’t pose binding legal obligations, except that employment tribunals can increase awards by up to 25% if the code isn’t followed and employees win unfair dismissal claims.
Under this code, employers will be required to conduct meaningful consultations and take reasonable steps to explore as many alternative solutions as possible before dismissal.
Consultation on the draft code has now closed, and results are now being analysed. There’s no date yet on when the Code will come into force in employment law.
Flexible working bill
Currently in employment law, employees can only request flexible working if they have been at the company for 26 weeks, and they can only make a request once per year. The Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill could make some significant changes to flexible working:
- flexible working will be available to request from day 1;
- employees able to make two flexible working requests per year;
- employers will have two months to respond to the request, as opposed to the current deadline of three months.
However, this proposed law still doesn’t mean that employers won’t be able to turn down requests; if their business isn’t suited to flexible working then they don’t need to offer it.
These changes to employment law may see more employers offering flexible working in order to increase their competitive edge when sourcing talented individuals; 58% businesses offer flexible working already.
Harassment
The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill, if passed, will make employers liable for third party harassment (for example from customers) of their employees if they have not taken reasonable steps to prevent it. This was specifically removed as form of liability in 2013, and is particularly relevant to the hospitality sector, where employers now need to put employees’ rights before the custom of racist and sexist patrons.
If the new duty is found to have been breached, there may in uplift of 25% added to any compensation.
Workplace Bullying Bill
Another proposed development to employment law is the Bullying and Respect at Work Bill, introduced by Rachael Maskell. If enacted, it will provide a legal definition for bullying and make it compulsory for business to create formal protocols for reporting and investigating bullying. It will also mean that any claims related to workplace bullying will have a chance to be heard at an employment tribunal, which they currently cannot, and will introduce a new respect at work code which will set out standards for positive and respectful work environments.
These changes will mean that employees will now have more power and confidence to report workplace bullying, as there will be real policies in place, unlike now, with the lack of access to justice explaining why 53% of incidents are never reported.
This new bill will also give power to the ECHR to investigate workplaces where there is evidence, or has been multiple accusations of, workplace bullying- which puts employers at more risk.
On the flip side, Maskell insists this is also beneficial for employers; bullying costs UK business around £18 billion a year, and around 17 million days days are lost each year due to negative work related behaviours, like bullying. Therefore, the implementation of this new bill help save businesses money, keep the number of days-off down and a legal definition for bullying may also help employer’s; what counts as ‘bullying’ can be subjective, so this definition will make investigating bullying claims, in theory, easier as it will give them a clear focus.
More employment law changes
There are number of other employment law changes happening in 2023, including more redundancy protection for pregnant employees, as well as statutory sick pay increasing from £99.35 per week to £109.40 per week, and statutory family payments increasing from £156.66 per week to £172.48. This increase includes the following:
- Statutory maternity pay
- Statutory adoption pay
- Statutory paternity pay
- Statutory shared parental pay
- Statutory parental bereavement leave.
For dismissals after April 6th 2023, a week’s pay (for basic award or redundancy payments) increased from £571 to £643. The compensatory award for unfair dismissal will increase from £93,878 to £105, 707.
Employment law is constantly changing, so there is no doubt that there will be more changes to come in 2023.
Image used under CC courtesy of Branko Collin.