The Employment Rights Bill has undergone significant amendments in March 2025 as it progresses through Parliament. Included in the amended bill are changes addressing redundancy and the controversial practice of “fire and rehire.”

Quick Hits

• In March 2025, the UK government announced amendments to the Employment Rights Bill following a series of consultations.
• The penalty “protective award” payable to employees when an employer fails to consult properly in a collective redundancy situation would be doubled from 90 to 180 days’ pay.
• Collective redundancy consultation obligations (which apply when twenty or more redundancies are proposed) would continue to be determined separately for each “establishment” (meaning “workplace”), removing the original proposal that the determination should be based on the total number of proposed terminations in the whole company.
• “Fire and rehire” would be automatically considered unfair unless carried out under very limited circumstances.

Redundancy

Amongst the bill amendments is an adjustment to collective redundancy rules. Employers are currently required to consult collectively when making twenty or more redundancies at a single establishment. The new amendments maintain this threshold, meaning that original plans to scrap this establishment test are no longer on the agenda. However, the amendments introduce a yet-to-be-defined threshold for multisite redundancies. This alternative threshold is expected to be based on redundancies...

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