Making Work Pay

In the latest series of meetings on the Make Work Pay plan, the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds hosted a Business Breakfast on Tuesday 3rd September 2024 to discuss the upcoming Employment Bill.

With employment rights high on the agenda, the ministers met with business representatives to discuss the impending legislation.

So far, Labour has been very vocal about their plans to create a new package of workers’ rights. Arguably many of these measures were announced by the Conservative Party, some of which have been adopted by the Labour Party, with enhancements and new reforms under plans to ‘Make Work Pay’.

The government initiative is to modernise the world of work by ending exploitative zero-hour contracts and delivering a genuine living wage.

Additional measures include:

• Further review of flexible working
• Day-one rights — protections, sick pay and parental leave available from day one
• Protections for new mothers
• Right to switch off’ — a new code of practice agreed with employees
• Banning fire and rehire
• Creation of a Fair Work Agency (Single Enforcement Body)

Recent announcements on plans to enhance flexible working rights could see a move to a standard four–day working week. This would be achieved by compressing the number of hours usually worked over five days to four.

Example: Employee works 40 hours per week

40 hours over 5 days (8 hours)

40 hours over 4 days (10hours)

The total number of worked hours remains the same each week, but the employee can choose to start or end their weekend on either a Friday or Monday.

This is nothing new, under the right to request flexible working employees can request changes to their working pattern, which from April 2024, is now a day one right for all employees.

Even so, some employers are somewhat concerned at what impact these long-term goals might have on businesses. The main concern or possible misunderstanding appears to be linked to Governments intention to see this as a standard set of rules that businesses ‘have’ to adopt.

The current rules remain the same as employers must carefully consider all requests and actively engage with employees to find a resolution. Equally, some employers will be unable to comply with some requests and these reasons must be appropriately addressed. Ensure all discussions are clearly documented.

Prior to any consideration government will be assessing the outcome of a follow-up trial on working a four-day week which is expected to start in November 2024.Businesses from different industry sectors are being invited to sign up to the scheme.

Earlier trials were conducted in February 2022 across a wide spectrum of businesses, some of which have continued with the new working model since the trials ended and for others it was not a success. Whether there are advantages or disadvantages will no doubt be influenced by types of industries, the size and structure of the company.

If you are a larger organisation, with a larger workforce, it might be advantageous to the business.

For smaller organisations this could be more of a challenge, employees will have more crossover duties so a potential to be accessible five days a week could be difficult.

The obvious benefit for employees would be access to longer weekends. Some employers from the earlier trials commented on seeing improvement in staff welfare and productivity. This was not the case for all sectors.

More detail will follow on the outcome of the trials, but for now, employers continue to apply their policies in line with the legislation changes pertaining to April 2024.

In the meantime, we can expect the announcement of the Employment Bill which is set to be introduced during the first 100 days of the new Parliament, and of course, the Autumn budget to be delivered on 30 October.