General Election 2024: employment manifesto commitments

The main political parties have now published their election manifestos, giving us a better idea of what employment law changes we can expect to see depending on who forms the new government on 5 July 2024. 

In this article we provide an overview of the main employment pledges, following the order in which the manifestos have been issued.  

Liberal Democrats 

The Liberal Democrat party manifesto was published on 10 June 2024, with the motto “for a fair deal”.

The main employment pledges in the manifesto are as follows: 

• Encouraging the promotion of employee ownership by giving staff in listed companies with more than 250 employees a right to request shares, held in trust for the benefit of employees. 

• Investing in people skills, including replacing the apprenticeship levy with a broader and more flexible skills and training levy and boosting the take-up of apprenticeships. 

• Establishing a new Worker Protection Enforcement Authority, for enforcement of the national minimum wage, tackling modern slavery and protecting agency workers. 

• Establish an independent review to recommend a genuine living wage across all sectors, with government departments and public sector employers taking a leading role by paying it. 

• To “modernise employment rights”, including by:  

– Establishing a new “dependent contractor” status, which would sit between employment and self-employment and give an entitlement to basic rights including minimum earnings, sick pay and holiday.

– Reviewing tax and Notional Insurance status of employees, dependent contractors and freelancers to “ensure fair and comparable treatment”.

– Setting the minimum wage 20% higher for zero-hours workers, to compensate them for the uncertainty of fluctuating hours of work.

– Giving zero-hours and agency workers the right to request a fixed hours contract after 12 months.

– Making it easier for workers (particularly those in the gig economy) to maintain pensions, ensuring portability between roles.

– Giving employers the burden of proof in employment status cases (presumably meaning that employers will need to prove that an individual is not employed – a presumption in favour of employee status).

– Expanding the right to take parental leave (the manifesto refers to “all parental leave”) and pay, making them day-one rights and extending to self-employed parents.

– Fixing the “broken Statutory Sick Pay system” by aligning it with the National Minimum Wage and making it payable from the first day of absence.

• Doubling SMP and SPP to £350 per week and increasing paternity leave pay to 90% of earnings (subject to a cap). The manifesto refers to introducing an extra “use-it-or-lose-it” month for fathers and partners, which presumably means an extension of the current right to statutory paternity leave to six weeks. Large employers will also be required to publish their parental leave and pay policies.  

• The manifesto sets out the “ambition” (“when the public finances allow”) to give all families (including self-employed) the right to six weeks of leave for each parent, paid at 90% of earnings, plus 46 weeks of parental leave to be shared between the parents as they choose, paid at double the current statutory rate.   

• Introducing paid neonatal care leave. 

• Making caring and care experience ‘protected characteristics’ under the Equality Act 2010. 

• Improving diversity in the workplace by: 

– Requiring large employers to monitor and publish data on gender, ethnicity, disability and LGBT+ employment levels, pay gaps and progression, and publish five-year aspirational diversity targets.

– Extending the use of name-blind recruitment processes in the public sector and encouraging their use in the private sector.

– Providing additional support and advice to employers on neurodiversity in the workplace and developing a strategy to tackle discrimination faced by neurodiverse children and adults.

• Tackling the disability employment gap with a targeted strategy to support disabled people into work, including specialist disability employment support, raising awareness of the Access to Work scheme and introducing “Adjustment Passports” to record the adjustments, modifications and equipment a disabled person has received. 

Conservatives 

The Conservative party manifesto was published on 11 June 2024 and can be accessed here.

The manifesto document is 80 pages long but contains very little in the way of proposed employment law measures. The main pledges are as follows: 

• Cutting employee National Insurance contributions to 6% by 2027. 

• Maintaining the National Living Wage at two thirds of median earnings. 

• Introducing controls on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives and spending in the civil service. 

• Requiring civil service jobs to be advertised externally, in order to identify the best candidates. 

• Introducing 15 hours of free childcare for children from nine months to two years from September 2024, increasing to a total of 30 hours free childcare from nine months up to school age from September 2025. 

• Reforming the process for issuing fit notes, shifting responsibility from GPs to specialist work and health professionals, ensuring that people are not signed off sick “as a default”. The intention would be to integrate this process with the new ‘WorkWell’ service, providing tailored support to help people stay in or return to work. 

• Funding an additional 100,000 “high-quality apprenticeships” and delivering the “Lifelong Learning Entitlement”, giving adults support to train and retrain throughout their working lives. 

• Defining the protected characteristic of ‘sex’ under the Equality Act 2010 as meaning biological sex “to protect female-only spaces”. 

• To continue implementation of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023, by introducing minimum service levels during strike action for key public services.  

In addition, we can expect that a new Conservative government would continue with legislation already in progress prior to the dissolution of Parliament, including rights to neonatal leave and pay, paternity bereavement leave, and a new right to request predictable working conditions (aimed at those on zero-hours contracts). 

Labour 

The Labour party published their updated ‘New Deal’ green paper on 22 May 2024, Labour’s Plan to Make Work Pay, setting out in detail their proposals for workplace reform. See our recent article for an overview of these proposals.  

The Labour party manifesto was published on 13 June 2024 and pledges to implement the New Deal proposals in full, introducing legislation within 100 days of taking office. The manifesto can be accessed here.

The manifesto itself sets out the following commitments: 

• Reforming employment support by bringing Jobcentre Plus and the National Careers Service to provide a national jobs and careers service, focused on getting people into work. Create local plans to support more disabled people and those with health conditions into work and tackling the backlog of Access to Work claims. 

• Establishing a youth guarantee of access to training, an apprenticeship or support to find work for all 18–21-year-olds and guaranteeing two weeks’ worth of work experience for young people. 

• Prior to implementing it’s ‘New Deal’ plan, a Labour government will consult with “businesses, workers and civil society” on how to put their plans into action and before legislation is passed. This will include: 

– banning exploitative zero-hours contracts

– ending fire and rehire

– introducing basic ‘day one’ rights to parental leave, sick pay and protection from unfair dismissal

– strengthening the collective voice of workers, including through trade unions, and creating a Single Enforcement Body to uphold employment rights

– ensuring that the minimum wage is a genuine living wage by ensuring it accounts for the cost of living and removing the discriminatory age bands.

• Implementing the socio-economic duty under the Equality Act 2010. 
• Strengthening rights to equal pay and protections from maternity and menopause discrimination and sexual harassment. 
• Introducing a “landmark Race Equality Act”, enshrining in law the right to equal pay for ethnic minority people, strengthening protections against dual discrimination and to “root out other racial inequalities”. 
• Introducing the full right to equal pay for disabled people, and introducing disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting for large employers. 

The Labour manifesto contains few surprises, with the majority of their proposals for workplace reform having already been published in full back in May (although this made no mention of race and disability equal pay). The manifesto restates the party’s promise to introduce legislation to implement reforms within 100 days, but the majority of the proposals will require the usual process of stakeholder consultation followed by parliamentary debate and approval before new legislation can take effect – meaning that it will take longer than 100 days for changes to come into force. 

The Birketts view 

The pledges made in the party manifestos are, as you would expect, big on promises but very short on detail of how these reforms will be implemented. The Labour party proposals in particular are wide-ranging and ambitious and will result in some major changes for employers to grapple with, if and when they reach the statute book. In practice, it is not uncommon for manifesto commitments to be ‘watered down’ considerably following the consultation process, but it will be interesting to see what happens in the aftermath of 4 July and what measures are prioritised by a new government.