Dive into our interview with Rebecca Florisson from Work Foundation (she is also one of our advisory board members at HR360) as she unpacks the Employment Rights Bill—its potential to tackle job insecurity, rebalance worker-employer relationships, and the need for a more holistic approach to worker protections.

Thank you for sitting down with me today Rebecca. It would be great if we could start with a brief intro regarding yourself and the Work Foundation.

I’m Rebecca Florisson, Principal Analyst at the Work Foundation at Lancaster University. We are a thinktank dedicated to ensuring everyone in the UK can access high quality, secure work, both through policy and practice. At the Work Foundation, I lead our research programme on insecure work, for which I have developed the UK Insecure Work Index – which is a unique way of measuring how multiple forms of insecurity come together for people across several dimensions, i.e., contractual insecurity, financial insecurity and a lack of access to rights and protections.

So, with this bill being one of the flagship pieces of legislation, what do you think in your view has galvanised such a wide review of the current employer – employee settlement? In other words, why is this bill is important?

So we have a context in which 6.8 million UK workers, that is one in five workers, experience severely insecure work, meaning they are in involuntary forms of insecure work or have multiple forms of insecurity coming together, such as unpredictable pay and lack of access to rights and protections. Some workers are more likely to be affected than others, with particularly women, young workers, disabled workers and those from ethnic minority backgrounds being likely to experience severely insecure work.

‘Only some of those recommendations were taken forward and the potentially more impactful changes were indefinitely delayed or not taken up at all’

The Government’s proposed Employment Rights Bill follows on the back of more than a decade of policy drift in this space, where the labour market was changing but policy wasn’t keeping up, and it allowed people to fall through the gaps. Think of the rise of the platform economy with many workers being designated as self-employed, and missing out on important protections and benefits. In 2017, the Taylor review of good work did make recommendations to Government to improve the quality and security of jobs, but only some of those recommendations were taken forward and the potentially more impactful changes were indefinitely delayed or not taken up at all. The Employment Rights Bill has the potential to close some of those gaps that have started opening up and make work more secure, but the devil will be in the detail.

Do you envisage any potential difficulties with the implementation of this bill once it becomes law?

The first difficulty is ensuring that the measures in the Bill remain strong against pressure to water it down. The Bill is undergoing parliamentary scrutiny, with many amendments and changes. After this, it will go to the Lords. All the while there is significant pressure from some businesses to dilute some of the proposed changes, for example around introducing guaranteed hours for zero hour contract workers. So there is a risk that this pressure may lead to watering down the Bill.

Ultimately, when the Bill gains assent, it will still take a long time for the different elements to be implemented likely from 2026 onwards. For this, secondary legislation will be used to fill in a lot of the policy detail and that detail is going to be absolutely key in ensuring that loopholes are closed and that the new regulations will have the positive impact that is intended.

Is there a particular part of this bill which you expect to be most impactful in rebalancing the employer – employee relationship?

The Bill aims to shift some risk and costs from employees onto employers – for example the proposed new rule where employers must offer guaranteed hours to zero-hour contract workers after a reference period. This may only affect about 1 million workers, but as this form of insecurity is so pernicious, it will be very important and has the potential to positively affect those workers’ contractual and financial security.

‘Some employers concerned they will not be able to fire underperforming workers, but that is not the case’

Another measure to pick out here is the introduction of employment rights from day one. In essence, this means workers will be able to claim for ‘ordinary’ unfair dismissal from day one of employment, rather than only being able to do so after two years as is the case currently. There are some misunderstandings around this, with some employers concerned they will not be able to fire underperforming workers, but that is not the case. It will still be possible to let workers go, but there will be more of an onus on employers to ensure the process is reasonable and fair. There are currently millions of workers who are not eligible because they have worked for their employer for less than two years, and this change will provide all of these workers with stronger protections at work.

In your view, do you feel the bill misses anything important?

There is a lot of detail that is yet to be worked out both in primary and later in secondary legislation which will determine how these new measures will ultimately affect workers’ lives. In my view, it is understandable that Government has focussed on specific, quite pernicious forms of insecurity, such as zero-hour contracts, but at the same time I know from the research that we have done at the Work Foundation that for millions of workers, multiple forms of insecurity come together, and that requires a more holistic approach.

‘multiple forms of insecurity come together, and that requires a more holistic approach’

In the same vein, it would be great if more aspects of job quality and security were consistently measured in national datasets to track the phenomenon and to be able to evaluate the impact that this Bill will have on people’s working lives.

In your view do you feel this legislation will have a positive effect on the number of people in work?

Improving the quality and security of jobs can function as a pull factor for people who may be outside the labour market and looking to get in. At the same time, we know that some people opt into insecure work because they need certain types of flexibility, for instance to manage caring responsibilities, or a health condition. This kind of flexibility can be difficult to come by in secure roles, which is why we see some workers trading off security for flexibility. So it’s key to raise standards and make insecure jobs more secure, and at the same time ensure that flexibility is embedded in all jobs and widely accessible to people. Those dual factors play a very important role in people’s ability to take up work, and to stay in sustained employment.