UK Employment Rights Act: What Changes in October, and Who Actually Owns It

Start with the correction. The new duty to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, and the third-party harassment provisions alongside it, were originally set for 1 October 2026. The government’s updated Employment Rights Act roadmap, published 16 July, moved them to 30 October. Plenty of readiness plans written before the summer still say 1 October.

What does land on 1 October is the tribunal claim window, which doubles from three months to six. There is a transitional provision worth knowing: the six-month limit only applies where the act or failure being complained about happens on or after 1 October. For a series of acts, it is the last one that counts. Conduct before that date keeps the three-month window.

The 30 October package is the heavier one. Alongside the harassment duties come trade union access rights, recognition reforms and industrial action protections. Employers with fewer than 21 staff are exempt from the access rights.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Your EOR is the legal employer, so the tribunal change and the union machinery are theirs. The harassment duty is not, or not entirely. “All reasonable steps” is measured against how your managers actually run your team: what training you ran, how you handled the last complaint, whether anyone wrote it down. Third-party liability is the one that catches distributed teams. If your UK employee is on calls with your customers all day, the customer is the third party, and your provider has no visibility into those calls and no ability to control them.

One thing to do this week: email your provider and ask, in writing, which of the 30 October items they are taking on and which they expect you to handle. Get the answer before October, not after a complaint.

Germany’s governing coalition published a labour reform package in August. The change worth tracking: from 1 January 2027, employers would be able to dismiss employees earning above roughly €177,400 without the usual dismissal protection.

That threshold matters more than it looks. Dismissal protection is the single most common reason companies avoid hiring senior people in Germany, or route them through contractor arrangements that create their own problems. A senior engineer or country lead is often above that line. If this passes, the exit cost on exactly those roles drops.

Two caveats. This is a coalition package, not enacted law, and German labour reform has stalled at this stage before. And it changes nothing about the hires you make between now and then.

Worth a note in your 2027 headcount planning. Not worth restructuring anything yet.

A Resume.org survey of nearly 1,400 US workers, published 19 August, found 57% of companies already use AI somewhere in hiring. A third use it for interviews, and half of those let the AI conduct the interview directly with no human present. Some employers are using tools that analyse candidate language, assess tone, and collect facial recognition data.

Run that stack in the EU and part of it is not a compliance question, it is a prohibition. The AI Act bans inferring emotions from people in the workplace, and that ban has applied since February 2025. A tool that scores a candidate’s tone or facial expression is squarely in it.

The confusion comes from the deferral. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the Digital Omnibus on AI, entered into force on 27 July, six days before the original deadline, and pushed the Annex III high-risk obligations covering recruitment, promotion and termination from 2 August 2026 out to 2 December 2027. That is enacted law now, not a proposal.

But the deferral moved one block of the Act, not the Act. The Article 5 prohibitions were never in scope. Article 50 transparency duties applied from 2 August 2026 and are live today. So a company that heard “delayed” and stopped work may be running a banned tool right now, sixteen months before the deadline it thinks it is working to.

If a vendor tells you AI hiring compliance in Europe is a 2027 problem, that is the answer of someone who read one headline. Ask them specifically about Article 5 and Article 50.