The Employment Rights Act 2025 (ERA 2025) introduces significant changes to trade union law. The government has recently published its proposals regarding the prohibition of detrimental treatment related to industrial action, and the introduction of electronic and workplace balloting for industrial action.
Protection Against Detriment for Taking Industrial Action
The ERA 2025 introduced Section 236A into the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (TULR(C)A), providing protection from detriments for workers enacted for the sole or main purpose of penalising, preventing or deterring them from taking industrial action.
The government has now published the draft Protection Against Detriment (Industrial Action) Regulations 2026, which implement these protections. This follows the government’s consultation, which ran from 27 February to 23 April 2026, and the subsequent response published on 23 June 2026. The consultation sought feedback as to whether regulations should prohibit all forms of detriment or contain an exhaustive list of specified prohibited detriments. The government confirmed its intention to adopt a comprehensive prohibition, reflecting feedback from the consultation process.
What do the regulations say?
The regulations take a broad approach, prohibiting all forms of detriment related to protected industrial action, rather than limiting the prohibition to a specific list of detriments. They confirm that the common law rules which allow an...
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