Top 5 recent workplace developments - April 2026

Stay informed with our roundup of the latest employment law developments.

1. Employment Rights Act: April 2026 changes
2. April 2026: Statutory and compensation rate increases 
3. Ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting
4. Tribunal claims: Strike out
5. Union Right of Access: Government consultation response

1.    Employment Rights Act: April 2026 changes

6 April 2026 is a key implementation date for Employment Rights Act reforms, with a number of significant changes taking effect.

We have summarised the key employment law changes in force from 6 April 2026, primarily introduced by the Employment Rights Act:

Duty to keep annual leave records: Employers are now required to keep ‘adequate’ records demonstrating compliance with workers’ annual leave and holiday pay entitlements, including payment in lieu of untaken holiday on termination. Records must be sufficient to evidence how holiday entitlement and pay are calculated, approved, taken and paid, and must be retained for six years. The duty applies to all workers, including those with irregular hours and part year workers.

Statutory Sick Pay: SSP is payable from the first day of absence, and available to all eligible employees regardless of their earnings.

‘Day one’ family leave rights: From the first day of employment, employees are entitled to paternity leave, unpaid parental leave and a new bereaved partners paternity leave, which provides for up to 52 weeks’ paternity leave where the mother or primary adopter dies in the first year of the child’s life.

Collective redundancy consultation: The maximum protective award for failure to comply with collective consultation obligations has doubled to 180 days’ gross pay per employee.

Sexual harassment disclosures: Reports of sexual harassment are included in the list of what counts as a qualifying disclosure under whistleblowing law.

Voluntary action plans: Large employers are encouraged to publish action plans on gender pay gaps and supporting employees during the menopause. 

Trade union recognition: The statutory process for trade union recognition has been simplified.

Practical point

Employers should ensure they update their policies and procedures to reflect these changes. The new requirement to retain annual leave records was introduced with minimal notice, giving employers little time to prepare. While organisations have flexibility over how these records are kept - they ‘may be created, maintained and kept in such manner and format as the employer reasonably thinks fit’ - they must be retained for six years and failure to comply will constitute an offence, punishable by a fine. Enforcement action by the Fair Work Agency, established on 7 April 2026, is expected from 2027.

See our tracker for more details about these, and upcoming, employment law changes. 

2.    April 2026: Statutory and compensation rate increases

The usual annual increases to statutory payment rates and compensation limits take effect from early April 2026.

The key increases to rates and limits are outlined here: 

• Unfair dismissal and redundancy limits:
  • New limits apply where the effective date of termination is on or after 6 April 2026: The limit on a week’s pay for the purposes of calculating statutory redundancy payments and compensation for unfair dismissal increases to £751 (up from £719). The maximum statutory redundancy payment and the basic award for unfair dismissal is now £22,530
  • The maximum compensatory award for unfair dismissal increases to £123,543 (from £118,223), or 52 weeks’ gross pay if less. This compensatory cap will apply until 31 December 2026, after which the cap will be removed entirely
• Other statutory rate increases include:
  • Statutory Sick Pay: £123.25 per week (up from £118.75) from 6 April 2026
  • Family leave-related statutory payments: Statutory Maternity Pay and Statutory Adoption Pay (after the first 6 weeks), Statutory Paternity Pay, Statutory Shared Parental Pay, Statutory Neonatal Care Leave Pay and Statutory Parental Bereavement Pay all increase to £194.32 per week (up from £187.18), or 90% of the employee’s average earnings if less. The SMP rate applies from 5 April 2026, with all other rates applying from 6 April 2026
  • National Living Wage: the hourly rate for workers aged 21 and over is £12.71 (up from £12.21) from 1 April 2026

Practical point

In addition, Tribunal awards for injury to feelings in discrimination claims will increase for claims issued on or after 6 April 2026:

• Lower band (less serious cases): £1,300 to £12,600
• Middle band (cases that don’t merit an award in the upper band): £12,600 to £37,700
• Upper band (most serious cases): £37,700 to £62,900, with the most exceptional cases capable of exceeding this level

3.    Ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting

The government has confirmed it plans to introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting obligations for large employers, although the timeline for implementation is not yet clear.

Ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting measures differences in average pay between ethnic groups and between disabled and non-disabled employees. Employees will self-report their ethnicity and disability status, but there must be “prefer not to say option” for employees who choose not to. 

In its response to last year’s consultation, the government has indicated that employers with 250 or more employees will be required to publish their ethnicity and disability pay gap data by reference broadly to the same six measures as they currently use for gender pay gap reporting. Those six measures are pay quarters, the mean and median differences in average hourly pay, the mean and median differences in bonus pay, and the percentage of employees receiving bonus pay. Employers will also be required to publish workforce breakdowns by ethnicity and disability, non-disclosure rates and action plans to tackle any pay gaps. 

Employers will be required to use data from a ‘snapshot date’ of 5 April each year and report their gaps within 12 months – by 4 April the following year. Employers below the threshold will be encouraged to report voluntarily. Ethnicity reporting will require both binary and broader group comparisons. Disability reporting will be based on a binary comparison only (ie disabled v non-disabled gap data). The Equality Act 2010 definition of “disability” will be used as the basis of identifying disabled employees. This means that a person is disabled if they have a physical or a mental condition that has a substantial and long-term impact on their ability to do normal day to day activities, with certain medical conditions deemed automatically to be disabilities. 

We are expecting further details of the new obligations on employers and details of the timing for implementation to be included in a draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, and the supporting regulations and government guidance. 

The government has indicated that it will provide detailed guidance on how the calculations should be carried out.

Practical point

Although large employers are already familiar with gender pay gap reporting, there is added complexity in relation to ethnicity and disability data. Ethnicity and disability data is often incomplete, categorised inconsistently and based on self-identification and voluntary disclosure. This gives rise to practical challenges for employers around data quality, interpretation and disclosure rates.

4.    Tribunal claims: Strike out

Delay to Employment Tribunal hearing made fair trial impossible

Mr Boateng was a Moss Bros Group (MBG) employee for 2.5 years before he was dismissed in 2019 following an incident involving Mr Boateng and a number of his colleagues. In 2020 Mr Boateng brought claims for unfair dismissal and discrimination on grounds of religion and belief.

Unfortunately, during Covid, MBG went bust, entering into a Creditors Voluntary Arrangement. Once that was completed, MBG applied to strike out the claim. The Tribunal agreed to strike out the discrimination claims on the basis that a fair hearing was no longer possible, due to delay and it struck out those claims, but it allowed the unfair dismissal and holiday-pay complaints to proceed. Mr Boateng appealed but the case proceeded to full hearing in February 2024 and his unfair dismissal and holiday pay claims were dismissed on their merits.

Mr Boateng appealed against the decision to allow the strike out of his discrimination claim but the Employment Appeal Tribunal dismissed his claim. It confirmed that a strike-out can be justified even where neither party is at fault for the delay - it was a question of what steps could reasonably have been taken to allow a fair hearing to proceed. It’s worth noting that this decision was highly fact specific. In this case the fact that 22 of the 27 people cited by Mr Boateng as having relevant evidence no longer worked for MBG and 17 were either uncontactable or uncooperative meant that realistically MBG would be at an unfair disadvantage if the hearing went ahead.

Practical point

Employment Tribunal caseloads are increasing, with government data showing that receipts of claims have exceeded disposals over the last year, resulting in a 19% increase in the open caseload to 831,000 at the end of December 2025. Cases are taking longer to be listed, with cases submitted now being listed for 2029 in some Tribunals.  

With these types of delays, it seems inevitable that that there will only be more examples of cases in which it will be arguable that the delay means that a fair hearing is not possible. 

5.    Union Right of Access: Government consultation response

The government has issued a consultation response and draft Code of Practice on the rights of trade unions to seek access to workplaces.

You may recall that the Employment Rights Act 2025 sets out a process for trade unions to seek a right of access to employer’s workplaces to engage with their workers in person or digitally for the purposes of representation, support, recruitment, organisation, and collective bargaining – applicable from October 2026.

To deliver this, the plan is to pass secondary legislation and a new statutory Code of Practice setting out how the right of access will operate. On 8 April 2026 the government published its response to the consultation on this topic together with a draft Code of Practice.

This sets out more details of the proposed process and timetable that unions and employers would have to follow. The key point to note is that the response times are brief – employers will have only 15 days to respond to a request and that if it is not possible to reach an immediate agreement, the following negotiation period would only be 25 working days long. With large, multi-departmental, matrixed organisations, this will present some significant issues.

Failure to reach agreement means that the union can then approach an independent body – the Central Arbitration Committee who will determine access terms and conditions, which may not suit the employer.

Practical point

For most private sector corporates, this new right of access will represent the first time that they have had to interact with unions in many decades. To get ahead of this, companies should review their existing employee engagement set-up and consider putting time and resources into this, to dilute the attraction of union approach post October 2026.