Topic
Body of UK statute and case law governing employment rights, workplace safety, dismissal, redundancy, and employer duties to staff.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham is expected to announce a clampdown on non-compete clauses and long notice periods used to hold tech and finance staff. Employers that rely on these terms get a direction to plan against from the speech, but the rules themselves have not been written.
Reality
Monash University's Susan Davis found menopause was not linked to absence or lost productivity in a study of more than 8,000 midlife women. The result undercuts the work case for the menopause plans large UK employers must publish from April 2027.
Reality
Guidance in Personnel Today says employees increasingly draft grievances with generative AI and that legal jargon now appears in nearly all of them. HR teams have to trim those complaints while keeping each investigation thorough enough to count as reasonable.
Reality
Glasgow City Council has put all 23,000 non-teaching staff on fire-and-rehire notice over a new equal-pay grading system that would cut pay for 11%. Council leader Ricky Bell's idea of dismissing only Unison members has the union taking legal advice.
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Acas is consulting until 17 December on a code for the autumn 2027 rule that UK managers meet staff before refusing a flexible working request. Employers can still say no, but only after that meeting and on the basis of evidence.
Reality
Britain's Employment Rights Act cuts the unfair-dismissal qualifying period from two years to six months on 1 January 2027. Writing in Personnel Today, Sarah Kerr argues that a thin probation file can leave a later redundancy score hard to explain.
Reality
Leaderboards at Disney, Meta, JP Morgan and KPMG rank how much staff use AI, and Accenture's chief says promotion depends on working that way, which leaves reviewers holding a usage count rather than evidence the work got better.
Reality
A rollback, a new internal eval category and a co-authored study put "unhealthy emotional dependence" in the vendor's own hand. That is the evidence base a duty-of-care claim starts from.
Reality