Member

“dismissals have to be ‘fair’, but where the bar that employers have to clear to demonstrate they have acted fairly is set lower. This is a messy compromise, and there is a risk that it is likely to be poorly understood by many employers, meaning that it may not fully mitigate any adverse effects on employers’ willingness to hire … the Government should change tack, and opt for the much more straightforward approach of keeping qualifying periods, but massively reducing them. This needs to happen now ... the Government has pencilled this change in for implementation in 2027 … And, although many of the ERB’s reforms won’t effectively be finalized until secondary legislation is passed, scrapping qualifying periods is happening in the primary legislation itself. Reducing rather than scrapping qualifying periods would still respect the spirit of the Government’s manifesto, and it would deliver a security upgrade to millions of workers (reducing the qualifying period to six months would give protection from unfair dismissal to an additional 6 million employees), but it would do so in a way that doesn’t needlessly put employers off hiring”.