UK: Union Right of Access: Government Consultation Response

Authors: Robert Hill, Corinna Harris, Sophie Jackson, & Charlotte Stern

The UK government has issued a consultation response and draft Code of Practice on the rights of trade unions to seek access to workplaces.

You may recall that the Employment Rights Act 2025 sets out a process for trade unions to seek a right of access to employer’s workplaces to engage with their workers in person or digitally for the purposes of representation, support, recruitment, organisation, and collective bargaining – applicable from October 2026.

To deliver this, the plan is to pass secondary legislation and a new statutory Code of Practice setting out how the right of access will operate.  On 8 April 2026 the government published its response to the consultation on this topic together with a draft Code of Practice.

This sets out more details of the proposed process and timetable that unions and employers would have to follow.  The key point to note is that the response times are brief – employers will have only 15 days to respond to a request and that if it is not possible to reach an immediate agreement, the following negotiation period would only be 25 working days long.  With large, multi-departmental, matrixed organisations, this will present some significant issues.

Failure to reach agreement means that the union can then approach an independent body – the Central Arbitration Committee who will determine access terms and conditions, which may not suit the employer.

Key Action Points for Human Resources and In-house Counsel

For most private sector corporates, this new right of access will represent the first time that they have had to interact with unions in many decades.   To get ahead of this, companies should review their existing employee engagement set-up and consider putting time and resources into this, to dilute the attraction of union approach post October 2026.