Consultation: "Make work pay: right of trade unions to access workplaces"
11 November 2025
The Employment Rights Act 2025 will introduce a statutory right for independent trade unions to access workplaces, both physically and digitally, for the purposes of meeting, supporting, representing, recruiting, or organising workers, and facilitating collective bargaining. This is expected to come into effect in October 2026 and will potentially result in a significant shift in UK industrial relations.
The detail of how the new right of access will work is to be set out in secondary legislation and is the focus of this Consultation (CP) which focuses on: requesting and negotiating an access agreement; what should inform the Central Arbitration Committee's (CAC) determinations on whether access takes place or not and the level of fines for breaches of access agreements.
This briefings sets out a high-level overview of the proposed operational detail of the trade union access regime and the practical implications for employers.
