Under the Employment Rights Act 2025, trade unions will have a new right to access workplaces from 30 October 2026.
The new right enables trade unions to access workplaces either digitally or in-person, for the purposes of meeting, supporting, representing, recruiting or organising workers or to facilitate collective bargaining.
Chris Coombes explains to Personnel Today that employers are “worried that unions, by inserting themselves between the employer and employees, are going to have a negative impact on that relationship.”
Representative and employee conversations should be private, with no employer present. Chris says that “some employers will also be very surprised to hear that they can’t have their own representative attend these meetings even though it is at their workplace”.
