Whilst employment lawyers, HR professionals and business-owners throughout the country have been readying themselves for the many and wide-ranging changes brought about by the Employment Rights Act 2025, one topic has been noticeably absent: employee restrictive covenants.
This comes partly as a surprise, given the increasing scrutiny of restrictive covenants (particularly non-competes) both home and away. Some US states recently banned non-compete restrictions entirely, whilst various EU jurisdictions have introduced minimum salary thresholds or mandatory compensation for restrictions to be enforceable. In the UK, Starmer's Labour government picked back up the thread of their Conservative predecessors in examining how regulation of non-compete restrictions might be reformed. The latest government working paper closed to comments on 18 February 2026, with no further developments announced to date.
It appears no legislative regulation of restrictive covenants is on the immediate horizon, especially given the recent change of Prime Minister. Whilst the government may be delaying, the courts certainly are not. There has been a flurry of judicial activity recently which has seen a number of valuable takeaways added to the ever-increasing web of case law.
As case law is currently solely responsible for governing restrictive covenants, employers (and indeed employees signing up to restrictive...
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