The Employment Rights Act became law late in 2025, but for warehouse operators some of its most important details are still to be decided.
At UKWA’s recent Member Connect Series event, we hosted a panel discussion with Laura Clarke, HR Director from CEVA Logistics, Lisa Meredith, Group Head of Compliance from GAP Personnel and specialist employment lawyer Sarah Owbridge, from Shoosmiths. Their message was clear: businesses need to start thinking about the changes now, even though we still do not know exactly how they will work.
The Act creates a new right for qualifying zero-hours and low-hours workers to be offered guaranteed hours reflecting the work they have performed over a reference period. The Government’s preference is for this reference period to be set at 12 weeks. UKWA, however, has argued strongly that this should instead be 52 weeks. Warehousing is seasonal. Peaks and troughs are fundamental to the way customer demand works. A short, 3-month snapshot risks turning a temporary Christmas peak, for example, into a permanent contractual obligation.
Policymakers are still consulting stakeholders on how “low hours” will be defined, and how frequently the calculation must be repeated.
Agency workers create another complication. Who should carry the obligation to offer guaranteed hour contracts: the agency or the end hirer? UKWA believes it must be the agency. An agency worker may split their time between several customers. How could one warehouse operator sensibly guarantee hours without knowing when that person is available? The agency is more likely to have visibility across multiple placements and is therefore better placed to manage the obligation. We acknowledge, however, that workers can make themselves available through several agencies, so even this may become complicated.
There will also be rights around reasonable notice of shifts, including payments where shifts are cancelled, moved or curtailed at short notice. Again, much of the detail remains unresolved. Our panellists questioned whether some of the thinking behind these reforms reflects an outdated view of workplace relations. Warehouse operators are not whimsically cancelling shifts for sport. Demand genuinely changes at short notice.
Containers are delayed, customer orders move, production schedules alter and volumes fluctuate. If businesses must pay substantially over the odds simply to accommodate normal variations in demand, UK competitiveness will suffer.
Understanding exactly how your own labour management works is sensible, but panellists warned against over-preparing. There is still much to be decided.
None of this means workers should be treated badly. Quite the opposite. Warehousing has its own history of genuinely one-sided flexibility. In the nineteenth-century docks, desperate casual labourers crowded at the gates for the daily “call-on”, sometimes fighting simply for the chance of a few hours’ work. That degrading system helped fuel the great Dock Strike of 1889 and the demand for the famous “dockers’ tanner”.
Nobody wants to return to that. The challenge for Government is to protect people from exploitation without regulating away the flexibility that modern logistics genuinely needs.
You can find further details about the UKWA position on these issues in our recent response to the ‘Make Work Pay’ consultation on reforms of zero hours and similar contracts, available here: www.ukwa.org.uk
Clare Bottle
UKWA, CEO
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