The Employment Rights Act 2025 signals a major shift in the UK’s industrial relations landscape, and HR teams will be at the centre of making it work in practice. The CIPD’s Rachel Suff examines how HR needs to prepare for trade union reforms.
With new provisions in the ERA granting trade unions greater access to workplaces, streamlining the statutory recognition process, and introducing a duty on employers to inform workers of their right to join a union, the reforms are expected to increase union visibility, membership, and requests for collective bargaining.
For many HR professionals, particularly in the private sector, declining union membership over recent decades has meant limited or no regular engagement with unions – official figures show that membership fell to just over a fifth (22%) of UK employees in 2024. In the late 1970s, more than 50% of UK employees were members of a union.
However, with trade union reforms taking effect from 2026 and 2027 – and some measures already enacted last week – that long-term decline may begin to reverse.
The question for HR teams is not whether the changes will have an impact on their organisation, but how prepared they are to respond.
Here, we suggest five steps that HR professionals should take to ensure their organisations are well prepared for the trade union reforms:
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