| The Government has published an updated Amendment Paper collating all proposed amendments to the Employment Rights Bill. The paper incorporates the amendments flowing from the Government’s response to its statutory consultations. It also includes further amendments proposed by the Government outside of these consultation areas.
In particular:
- Changes have been made to the guaranteed hours provisions which seem to suggest that it will be possible to contract out of the requirement to offer guaranteed hours by way of collective agreement, and replace them with something else, so long as the new terms are contractual.
- In a concession to employers, the proposal to remove the words ‘any one establishment’ from the provisions relating to collective redundancy situation (which would’ve meant that collective consultation would’ve been engaged whenever the total number of redundancies across a business was 20 or more, even if each site was making fewer than 20 redundancies) has been altered. The amended proposal reinstates the concept of ‘one establishment’ but then allows, in a case where employees are being made redundant at more than one establishment, for regulations to prescribe a number of employees (higher than 20) for the purposes of determining when collective consultation applies in relation to those employees.
- A proposal that the Secretary of State can give the employer a notice of underpayment, covering a period of up to six years, where an employer has failed to pay a worker an amount due to the worker under certain legislation (eg minimum wage or statutory sick pay), requiring the employer to pay the amount due.
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