IOSH statement on UK Employment Rights Bill

The Employment Rights Bill has the potential to be a watershed moment for the UK. It is a significant and refreshing step forward. Legislation on exploitative zero-hours contracts and strengthening employees’ rights to request flexible working are long overdue, as are establishing day-one rights to sick pay.

However, we are keen for the right to “switch off” from work communications to be brought into the Bill, to prevent the boundary between people’s work and personal lives from remaining blurred. So today, on World Mental Health Day 2024, we call for greater clarification to stop people from having to be ‘always on’ or working long, onerous shifts or additional hours, something which risks harming their physical and mental health. 

This is the focus of IOSH’s ‘small print’ campaign. It highlights how workers, when seeking, applying and starting a job, will have clear needs and expectations like salary, location and benefits that attracted them to that job. However, they are too often sucked in by hidden demands and conditions in their contracts that expose them to harm – like poor workplace health and safety culture, having to work long or unreasonable hours, being expected to respond to work matters when on holiday and living with the stress and anxiety of excessive work demands.

Good work, based on a productive work-life balance and favourable working conditions, feeds off the way it enables people to live healthier, more sustainable lives. At such a critical time for the UK economy, where unprecedented levels of inactivity are holding it back, we should be doing everything we can to support people into work, to remain at work and thrive at work.

In addition, we would like the Bill to cover other key areas, including protections around the use of AI and new technologies in workplaces, access to occupational health systems to reduce the burden of work-related physical and mental ill health, greater funding for the Health and Safety Executive, and addressing human rights abuses in supply chains. We are keen to work with the Government on strengthening this and other parts of the Bill.

We’re encouraged the Bill will empower workers to protect their safety and health, help small businesses and the self-employed to access these worker protections and give safety and health professionals the backing they need to help complete the transformation the UK economy so desperately needs.