The Employment Rights Act 2025: What Charities Need to Do Now

The Employment Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent in December 2025 and the first major wave of changes landed on 6 April 2026. There's more coming in October. And another tranche in January 2027.

If you lead a charity or social enterprise and you haven't reviewed your employment policies yet, you're behind. Not catastrophically — but the window for getting ahead of this is closing.

Here's what's already live, what's next, and what you actually need to do about it.

What changed in April 2026

Three things that matter most for charities:

Statutory Sick Pay is now payable from day one of absence. The three waiting days are gone. The lower earnings limit has been removed too, so part-time and lower-paid staff — common in the charity sector — are now eligible regardless of what they earn. If your absence policy still references waiting days or an earnings threshold, it's out of date.

Paternity leave and unpaid parental leave are now day-one rights. No qualifying service needed. If you've got contract templates or a staff handbook that says otherwise, they need updating.

The maximum protective award for failing to consult properly on collective redundancies has doubled — from 90 days' pay to 180 days' pay per affected employee. For charities that restructure when funding changes, this one matters. Getting collective consultation wrong just became twice as expensive.

Sexual harassment disclosures are now explicitly protected under whistleblowing law. If someone in your organisation raises a concern about sexual harassment, they have full whistleblower protection from day one. Your whistleblowing policy needs to reflect this.

What's coming in October 2026

The harassment prevention duty gets significantly stronger. Employers will need to take "all reasonable steps" to prevent sexual harassment — up from "reasonable steps." That single word changes the standard. A policy on a shelf won't cut it. Tribunals will want to see evidence of risk assessments, regular training, reporting mechanisms, and documented action.

Employers will also become liable for harassment of their staff by third parties — customers, clients, service users, visitors. For charities working with vulnerable people, in community settings, or with public-facing services, this is significant. You need to think about where the risks are and what you're doing to prevent them.

Tribunal time limits are extending from three months to six months for most claims. That means a disgruntled former employee has twice as long to bring a claim. More claims will land. Documentation and process matter more than ever.

What's coming in January 2027

The headline change: unfair dismissal protection after six months' service, not two years. The compensation cap is being removed entirely.

This fundamentally changes the risk profile of every dismissal in the first two years of employment. For charities — where budgets are tight and a single tribunal claim can consume thousands in management time and legal costs — this is the change that demands the most preparation.

And here's the detail most people miss: employees recruited on or after 1 July 2026 will accrue unfair dismissal rights after six months. So this isn't a January 2027 problem. It's a recruitment problem from this summer onwards.

What this means if you're a charity with no HR function

Most of the large employers will absorb these changes through their existing HR teams. For charities with 15, 30, 50 people and no dedicated HR — which is most of the sector — the question is who's actually going to do the work.

Someone needs to review your contracts, handbook, and policies against the new requirements. Someone needs to update your absence procedures, your family leave provisions, your whistleblowing policy. Someone needs to think about harassment risk assessments and whether your managers know what to do when someone raises a concern. And from the summer, someone needs to make sure your recruitment and probation processes are tight enough to manage the new dismissal landscape.

That's not a one-afternoon job. And it's not something a generic HR helpline is set up to do properly — because the advice needs to be shaped around your organisation, your contracts, your risk profile.

We work with charities and social enterprises across Sheffield, South Yorkshire and the UK as a fractional Head of People and retained HR advisory. If you're looking at this list and thinking "we haven't done any of this," a discovery call is a good place to start. We'll tell you where your biggest gaps are and what to prioritise.