What you need to know about the new Employment Rights Bill

I’ve been reflecting on the Employment Rights Bill, and what it reveals about where protection shows up at work, and where it still arrives too late.

I am less interested in the Bill as a list of reforms than in what it reflects. It intersects closely with patterns I have spent years researching and living alongside. Patterns about when protection is triggered, who it reaches in time, and whose livelihoods are left exposed in the meantime.

Viewed through the lens of disability and reasonable adjustments, this legislation tells a much more specific story.

A change in timing, not just thresholds

One of the most significant changes in the Bill is the reduction of the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from two years to six months.

Qualifying periods are often discussed as technical detail, but they are deeply consequential. They shape when protection begins, how risk is distributed, and who is expected to absorb uncertainty while they settle into work.

For Disabled people and those managing long-term health conditions, the early months of employment are rarely neutral. This is the period where adjustments are still being worked out, where disclosure decisions are being navigated, and where energy is split between doing the job and managing access. Performance is often assessed before support has stabilised.

A two-year qualifying period placed a long stretch of vulnerability at exactly this point. Reducing that period to six months does not remove risk entirely, but it does bring protection closer to the reality of how work actually unfolds.

Why the first months matter so much

The first six months of a role are often treated as provisional. A time to test fit, pace, and capability.

For Disabled employees, it is also a time of negotiation. Adjustments may be agreed in principle but not yet implemented. Tools may be trialled and adapted. Symptoms may fluctuate as routines change. None of this fits neatly into linear performance models.

What came through repeatedly in the More Than Reasonable research was not resistance to adjustments, but delay. Delay while processes caught up. Delay while managers sought reassurance. Delay while someone proved they were worth investing in.

When protection is pushed further down the line, that delay becomes dangerous. People exit roles not because adjustments would not have worked, but because they were never given the time or safety to do so.

The removal of the compensation cap and what it signals

Alongside the shortened qualifying period, the Bill removes the long-standing cap on compensatory awards for unfair dismissal. This change is often framed in terms of liability, but it is more useful to think about it in terms of recognition.

Compensation caps assumed that the impact of unfair dismissal could be standardised. That harm could be limited, predicted, or absorbed in the same way for everyone. For many Disabled people, that has never been true.

Losing work because reasonable adjustments were not properly supported can unravel more than income. It can affect health, housing security, confidence, and future employability. It can compound existing disadvantages and make returning to work significantly harder.

Removing the cap does not guarantee justice. But it does acknowledge that harm is contextual, and that livelihoods should not be reduced to a ceiling set in advance.

What this reflects from the evidence

None of this is new. That is perhaps the most important thing to say.

The More Than Reasonable research did not uncover a lack of law. It uncovered a misalignment between legal intent and workplace timing. Protection often arrived after the point it was most needed. Adjustments were framed as something to revisit later, once someone was established, settled, or secure.

This Bill does not resolve that misalignment. But it narrows it.

It brings unfair dismissal protection closer to the point at which adjustments are still bedding in. It increases the consequences of failing to support access properly. And in doing so, it makes visible something that has long been quietly accepted.

That early decisions matter.

What this invites businesses to reflect on

Rather than seeing this legislation as something to manage around the edges, it is worth asking what it reveals about existing systems.

What assumptions are baked into probation processes. Who is expected to adapt first. How quickly adjustments are expected to work. And how much uncertainty individuals are asked to carry before protection appears.

Reasonable adjustments do not fail because they are unreasonable. They fail when people are not still there to benefit from them.

If probation is treated only as an assessment period, rather than a supported transition, Disabled employees remain exposed. If adjustments are deferred until someone feels secure enough to insist, the system continues to reward endurance over access.

A shift worth paying attention to

The Employment Rights Bill will not close the gap between policy intent and lived experience. That work remains ongoing, and it will not be solved through legislation alone.

But this Bill does shift where scrutiny sits. It shortens the distance between vulnerability and protection and it recognises that harm cannot always be neatly capped. It also exposes how often fairness has been treated as something that can be deferred until someone is established.

The question it leaves us with is not whether the law has changed, but whether our understanding of good work has kept pace.

That feels like a question worth sitting with.