Published alongside the Employment Rights Bill, the government’s ‘Next Steps’ policy paper sets out its ‘vision and objective for Make Work Pay’ and wider reforms to be implemented outside the Employment Rights Bill.

The government will launch a Call for Evidence on banning unpaid internships by the end of the year. It will establish a working group by the end of the year, including unions and cyber security experts, to make provisions for electronic balloting, ‘with full rollout implemented following the Royal Assent of the Bill’.

Government says that it will use the New Fair Employment Code to strengthen protections for the self-employed against late payment and will ‘progress commitments’ on paid travel time. It will provide for a ‘Right to Switch Off’ through a statutory Code of Practice.

Other measures will include:

  • removing National Minimum Wage age bands;
  • a ‘Dying to Work’ Charter;
  • ‘modernising health and safety guidance’;
  • enacting the socioeconomic duty;
  • extend the Public Sector Equality duty to all parties exercising public functions; and
  • developing guidance for employers and guidance on health and wellbeing.

There is to be a new Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, with a draft to be published in this parliamentary session, which will:

  • extend pay gap reporting to ethnicity and disability for employer with more than 250 staff and measures on equal pay;
  • extend equal pay rights to protect workers suffering discrimination on the basis of race or disability;
  • ensure that outsourcing of service can no longer be used by employers to avoid paying equal pay; and
  • implement a regulatory and enforcement unit for equal pay with the involvement of trade unions.

Further longer-term reforms are also envisaged as follows:

  • parental leave review;
  • carers’ leave review;
  • consultation on workplace surveillance technologies;
  • consultation on single ‘worker status;
  • right to written contract for the self-employed, and extending blacklisting and health and safety protections;
  • call for evidence ‘to holistically examine a wide variety of issues relating to TUPE regulations and process’;
  • review health and safety guidance and regulations;
  • consultation with ACAS concerning collective grievances;
  • ensuring social value is mandatory in procurement contract design, and using public procurement to raise standards in employment rights;
  • extending the Freedom of Information Act to private companies which hold public contracts and publicly funded employers.