The Department for Business and Trade has published a number of further consultations as it continues to implement the Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA).

The first consultation concerns the new protections for workers from suffering detriments as a result of taking industrial action. Section 76 ERA inserts a new section 236A into the Trade Union Labour Relations Consolidation Act 1992 which provides as follows:

“A worker has the right not to be subject as an individual to detriment of a prescribed description by an act, or any deliberate failure to act, by the worker’s employer, if the act or failure takes place for the sole or main purpose of preventing or deterring the worker from taking protected industrial action, or penalising the worker for doing so”.

Under this provision, the Government is empowered to introduce secondary legislation that either (a) prohibits all detriments for taking industrial action or (b) creates a list of detriments that are prohibited.

The consultation explores both sets of options, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of each. Ultimately, the Government’s preferred option is that all detriments for taking industrial action should be prohibited, even though the concept of “detriment” in case law is wide and such an approach could limit options available to employers to manage industrial action. On balance, the view taken is that this is preferable to setting out a list of detriments which risks being inconsistent with existing legislation, incompatibility with Article 11 of the ECHR, and needing to be regularly updated as new forms of detriment arise.

The consultation closes on 23 April 2026, and can be found here.

The second consultation seeks views on the level and methods by which the new threshold for triggering collective redundancy obligations might be set.

As it stands, the threshold is only triggered where an employer is proposing to dismiss as redundant 20 or more employees at one establishment within a 90-day period or less. Under the new rules, a new ‘organisation-wide’ threshold is introduced, which seeks to protect employees where redundancies are dispersed across an organisation rather than concentrated at a single establishment.

The consultation sets out the various methodologies that could be employed for calculating the new organisation-wide threshold, before settling on two proposals. The first (and the Government’s preferred option) is to use a single fixed number, such that the threshold would be met when a certain number of redundancies (the consultation suggests anywhere between 250 and 1000) are proposed. The second option is to still apply a threshold based on a fixed number, but that it would vary according to the size of the employer.

The consultation closes on 21 May 2026, and can be found here. 

Keep up with all the latest updates on the Employment Rights Act by bookmarking our tracker.