Burnham moves to limit the non-competes and long notice periods used to hold tech and finance staff

Burnham, the Prime Minister, will speak in Manchester alongside former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the business secretary, according to the Financial Times ^[6][1]. The speech is a statement of intent. A source told the paper that Burnham would "set the direction of travel" on reducing employment restrictions, and that finer detail of the changes would come later ^[13].

Until that detail arrives, the useful question for an employer is how much of its protection sits in the clauses under review. They cluster in tech and finance, where firms worry that departing staff will take intellectual property or trade secrets to a rival ^[3]. On the Nockolds count, employers in those sectors have also been going to court to enforce them more often ^[11].

City AM reported that representatives of more established businesses may push back. The CBI has previously argued there is little evidence that these conditions weigh on innovation ^[10]. That challenge is aimed at a case built largely on what founders report about themselves. Enterprise Britain, a lobby group set up by Ovo Energy founder Stephen Fitzpatrick and lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman, found that 87% of scale-up bosses listed non-competes as a barrier to their hiring plans ^[8]. Three quarters said they could create at least 10% more jobs if barriers to expansion were removed ^[9]. Those are survey answers from the firms that would gain. The litigation figure records what employers actually did, and a rise in enforcement claims suggests the clauses are stopping more departures, whatever their effect on innovation ^[11]. The founders' letter makes a wider claim about cost. "These terms lower wages, reduce competition and undermine the innovation that drives economic growth," they wrote ^[5].

For employers, the trade-off is between keeping a person out of the market for a set period and protecting what that person knows. Enterprise Britain's report, Time to Act, calls for a ban on non-competes "while maintaining protections on intellectual property and confidentiality" ^[12]. Employment lawyers have suggested that businesses would rely more heavily on those other restrictions if non-competes were removed ^[15]. I'd expect that to ask more of employers. They would have to show which information is secret and who holds it. The government has not yet said whether notice periods will be capped, or at what length ^[13].