After the resignation of Angela Rayner, the UK government faces an urgent question: what will happen to its flagship employment rights bill? The former deputy prime minister was an important champion of the bill – and businesses have seized an opportunity to call for it to be diluted. At the same time, unions are pressing hard in the opposite direction.

Shortly after Labour won office in 2024, prime minister Keir Starmer described the bill as “the biggest levelling up of workers’ rights in a generation”, adding it was designed to give people “security, dignity and respect at work”.

In its manifesto, Labour had promised to “make work pay” – so the ambitious draft bill introduced in October 2024 contained 28 reforms to employment rights. These include requiring employers to guarantee workers a minimum number of hours; strengthening redundancy rights; rights to parental leave and protection from unfair dismissal from a worker’s first day; and expanding trade union rights.

Not only are the changes wide-ranging, they also affect a very large number of workers. There are, for example, nine million people in the UK who have been in their job for less than two years and who will gain the right to claim unfair dismissal.

The bill passed the House of Commons in March 2025. The........

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