A Letter Six Months Later

Kate 0:38

Picture this, it's next March. Business is fine, the years ticking along, and a letter lands. It's about somebody who left you last autumn. You remember the situation roughly. There were a few conversations, there was a meeting where you explained your reasoning, and you were fair about it, you know you were. There might have been an email. You're fairly sure there was an email. And now somebody is asking you to set out, in order, what happened, when, who was there, what was said, what you considered, and why you decided what you decided. Six months after the fact. That's the change I want to talk about today because it's the quietest one in the whole autumn and it's the one I'd most like small business owners to take seriously. From the 1st of October, the time limit for bringing most employment tribunal claims doubles. Three months becomes six. It doesn't change a single thing about how you're expected to treat your people. What it changes is how long you stay exposed afterwards and how long your evidence has to survive. Which makes this an episode about paperwork, and I know, but stay with me because the version of paperwork I'm going to describe is far smaller and far more useful than the one you're dreading. Kettle on. Let's get into it. The Welcome to the Hive. Welcome back to Buzzing About HR, the podcast that makes sense of the world of work. One honeycomb of good advice at a time. I'm Kate, your HR Queen Bee, and Hazel, our well-being officer, is here and has very strong opinions about today's subject, which I will be reading out in a bit. She's a German short-haired pointer, she's two and a half, and she has never once been asked to justify a decision in writing, which I think is why she's so relaxed about all this. Today, we've got three things. The tribunal time limit, doubling on the 1st of October, which applies right across England, Wales, and Scotland, and what it means for something that happened in September. Three real cases that show, better than any lecture could, what happens when an employer decides what it believes instead of asking somebody qualified, and what happens when the process has gaps in it. And two consultations with the clock running, one of which closes tonight. So this is genuinely your last chance to have your say. And here's my promise, as always, no doom, no fear, no lecture about compliance. If you're already fair, consistent, and reasonably organized, this change asks nothing new of you. It just raises the price of being sloppy. Let's go.

Tribunal Deadlines Double From October

Kate 3:24

The buzz. Right. First things first, what's actually changing? At the moment, someone who wants to bring most types of tribunal claim, unfair dismissal, discrimination, and so on, generally has three months less one day from the relevant event to get started. Miss that window, and, in most cases, the claim is out of time. Three months has a way of concentrating minds, and plenty of potential claims never get brought at all. Because life moves on and the deadline goes past. From the 1 October, that window doubles to six months for most claims, and that is England, Wales, and Scotland together on the same day. You may have seen the 9th of November attached to Scotland. It's a real date, but it's narrower than most people think. It's the date breach of employment contract claims in Scotland move across. Everything else is the 1st of October, wherever your people work. And here's the question I'm actually being asked, so let me answer it plainly. The new six-month limit applies where the relevant event happens on or after the 1st of October. Something that happened in September keeps the old three-month clock on it. So if you dismiss somebody in the middle of this month, that one is still on three months. Dismiss somebody on the 2nd of October and you're into the new window. Two clocks running side by side for a while, which is worth knowing before you tell anybody confidently how long they've got. Everything else stays as it is. The person still needs a valid claim. Early conciliation through ACAS still applies. All that's changed is that they now have half a year to decide whether to pursue it, to take advice, to talk it over with family, and to lodge it. That sounds small, it really isn't. And here's why. Think about it from the point of view of somebody who left feeling hard done by. Under the old rules, they had a tight window while everything was still raw. Now they've got six months, time to talk to friends, time to see a solicitor, time for a grievance to harden into a claim. So the first effect is that more claims get brought, because more people are still inside the window when they decide to act. The second effect is the practical one, and it's the whole point of this episode. Your evidence now has to survive twice as long. The conversation you had, the reason you made the decision, the steps you followed, all of it needs to be clear and findable six months on, not three. Memories fade fast. People leave, including the manager who ran the meeting. An informal decision that made complete sense in the moment becomes extremely hard to defend when you're reconstructing it half a year later with nothing written down. Twice the window is twice the exposure. That's the buzz.

ACAS Code Draft And Consultations

Kate 6:29

Now, the second piece of news, and it's genuinely time sensitive. Acus has published a draft of a brand new code of practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures. It's the first proper rewrite since 2009. The consultation is open now, and it closes at 1159 tomorrow night. Wednesday, the 23rd of September. The proposed direction is interesting and I think mostly good. There's a much stronger push towards early informal resolution, with mediation and facilitated conversations named as real options rather than afterthoughts. The language gets less adversarial, so concerns rather than allegations. There are clearer expectations about suspension, which has needed sorting out for years, because too many employers still treat suspension as an automatic first move. There are new provisions on avoiding discrimination during a process and making reasonable adjustments while it's running, which matters enormously and is very often missed. Accompaniment is treated as good practice even at informal meetings, and the word worker is used throughout rather than employee. Nothing is final. It's a draft, out for consultation, and it may change. But it tells you where the direction of travel is. Less formality, earlier conversations, more care taken over the human being in the middle of the process. And it's worth remembering why the code matters at all. An unreasonable failure to follow the ARCAS code can add up to 25% to a tribunal award. So this isn't guidance you can file under interesting. If you want to respond, it's on the ACAS website and you have until tomorrow night. And while I'm on consultations, there's one closing tonight. 1159, the 22nd of September, today, as you're listening to this. It's the consultation on holiday pay compliance and enforcement, and it is about how the Fairwork Agency will police statutory holiday pay. That is worth two minutes of your attention, even if you never respond, because holiday pay is the single most commonly miscalculated thing in a small business. And this is the consultation that decides who gets to come looking. If you have a view, tonight is your night.

Fair Versus Provably Fair Decisions

Kate 9:01

The hive check. Let's clear up the muddle because I've already had this conversation three times this month. The muddle is that people hear tribunal time limits are doubling and assume the rules about dismissing people have got harder. They haven't. A fair dismissal on the 30th of September is still a fair dismissal on the 1st of October. Same test, same process, same reasons you can rely on. What's changed is durability. Your decision now has to be explainable for twice as long. And here's the heart of it. There's a difference between a decision that was fair and a decision you can show was fair. Most employers I meet are doing the first one. They're decent people, they think carefully, they try to do right by their staff. The gap is nearly always in the second half. Nobody wrote down what was considered. The reasoning lived in somebody's head, and that somebody has now left or genuinely cannot remember whether the conversation was in April or May. Under a three-month window, you could sometimes get away with that because the trail was still warm. Under six months, you're relying on memory to do a job that memory has never been any good at. So the honest check is this. Take the last difficult decision you made about a person. Could someone else in your business opening the file today tell me what happened, when and why? If yes, you're fine, and this change costs you nothing. If no, that's the gap, and it's a small and fixable one. The

Three Cases That Change Behaviour

Kate 10:47

sting. Now let me make it real with three cases, because stories stick where checklists slide off. The first is Jones and Pilkington UK Limited, and it's one of the clearest cautionary tales I've read in years. A man with 36 years' service was off sick. His employer suspected he wasn't as unwell as he said. So instead of running a proper absence process, they engaged surveillance agents who filmed him at a friend's farm, handling potatoes and a watering hose. On the strength of that footage, he was dismissed for gross misconduct. He won. Unfair dismissal and disability discrimination. And it settled at £329,000. Now, the bit that matters most for you isn't the number, it's what the tribunal actually criticized. The employer had not taken advice from an appropriate medical advisor, and they had not considered other explanations for what the footage showed. That's it. That's the whole failure, and both halves of it were entirely avoidable. Because think about what surveillance footage really is. A few minutes of somebody's day with no context. Interpreted by people who already believe they know what they're about to see. Someone signed off with a back condition can still have a good hour on a Tuesday. Someone with a fluctuating condition can look fine and then pay for it for three days. That's exactly what occupational health is for. It's the appropriate medical advisor telling you, in writing, what this person can and can't do before you decide anything. So the lesson is a blunt one, and I'll give it to you straight. Never spy on a sick employee. If you have genuine concerns about an absence, run a fair, documented process instead. Keep in reasonable contact. Hold proper welfare and review meetings. Get occupational health advice. Consider other explanations honestly, including the ones you don't want to be true. Record each step as you go. That protects your employees' dignity and it protects you because if it ever reaches a tribunal, you can show exactly what you did and why. Suspicion is not evidence. A calm, well-recorded process is. And there's a live consultation sitting right on top of that case. The government is consulting on the fair, transparent and responsible use of workplace monitoring technologies, meaning anything used to monitor, manage or make decisions about workers. And it closes at 11.59 pm on the 30th of September. The themes are clarity, transparency and worker voice, which tells you the direction of travel. It's towards employers having to be open about how they watch their people. And Pilkington is what the wrong end of that road looks like. The second case is much newer. It's from June this year, and it pairs with Pilkington so neatly that I'd staple them together. Cunningham and the BBC, an employment appeal tribunal decision from the 29th of June 2026. A BBC Scotland presenter with type 2 diabetes told her employer in March 2023 that she was struggling with fatigue. Occupational Health recommended taking her off early and late shifts. The BBC took her off the early shifts, and off one category of late shift, but kept her on a shift that finished around midnight. The question that ended up at the EAT was whether the employer knew she was disabled. And the answer was that nobody had to spell it out, because the employer had what's called constructive knowledge. Look at what was sitting in front of them. The diagnosis, the documented fatigue, an occupational health recommendation for reasonable adjustments, and the employee using the word disability about herself. Type 2 diabetes is inherently long term, and where occupational health advice is vague, the employer is expected to go back and ask rather than take the reading that suits them best. One more line worth writing down because it catches people out constantly. Symptoms being managed or improving is not evidence against disability. So here's the lesson. Straight. You do not get to not know. The test is not what you happen to be told, it's what a reasonably diligent employer would have found out. If the facts in front of you are pointing at a disability, the job is to go and find out, not to wait to be handed a letter that says so. And let me deal with the worry I hear most often on this, because it stops good employers doing the right thing. Putting an adjustment in place while you find out is not an admission of anything. You are not conceding that somebody is disabled by taking them off the midnight shift while you get proper advice. You are being sensible, and it is very often the cheapest thing you will ever do. Which is exactly why these two belong together. Pilkington decided what it believed instead of asking somebody qualified. The BBC decided what it had been told instead of asking somebody qualified. Same mistake wearing different clothes and both of them fixable with one phone call to occupational health. The third case I'll leave unnamed because the point is the principle. Here, an employer dismissed someone on genuinely serious health and safety grounds. The reason was real and it was serious. But the process had gaps in it, steps were missed or done imperfectly. On the face of it, that's the sort of procedural slip that sinks a dismissal. The Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld it anyway, on the basis that fairness is judged in the round, looking at the whole picture rather than one misstep. It would be very easy to take the wrong lesson from that. Please don't. That employer got lucky, and you should never build your approach around getting lucky. In the round is a safety net that sometimes catches employers and sometimes doesn't, and you don't get to know in advance which way it'll go. The genuine reason mattered enormously. But the sensible plan is to have the genuine reason and the proper process, so you're never depending on a tribunal's charitable overall view to rescue you. The Growl. Hazel says the quiet part. Right. Hazel has been waiting for this one since I read her the first case out loud. She can't tell you what she made of it, so here are the subtitles.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Let me get this straight. You paid two grown adults to sit in a field and film a poorly man holding a hosepipe. A phone call would have cost you nothing, taken four minutes, and you would still have your £329,000. Subtitles off.

Kate 19:07

We do not gloat about other people's tribunal awards in this house. Although I don't think that was gloating. I think that was costing it up. Four minutes. What I would say professionally is this. When an employer starts gathering intelligence instead of gathering information, that's usually the moment the process has stopped being fair. Covert surveillance doesn't tell you whether someone is fit for work because it can't. Or, and the subtitles got there well ahead of me, you could ask him. Yes. A welfare meeting, a proper conversation about how he is and what he can manage, occupational health advice in writing, and an honest look at whether there's another explanation for what you think you've seen. All of which is cheaper than a hedge. It was a field. It was definitely a field. And no, I'm not going to disagree with a single word of it. Not one. The waggle dance. So what does a clean paper trail actually look like? Less than you fear. And this is the whole defense.

The Minimal Paper Trail That Works

Kate 20:28

1. Write things down as they happen. Notes of meetings, what was said, what was agreed, and above all the reasons for the decision. Contemporaneous notes made at the time carry far more weight than anything reconstructed afterwards. This does not mean a transcript. Half a page dated is worth more than nothing at all, which is what most businesses have. 2. Record what you considered and rejected, not just what you decided. That's the bit everybody misses, and it's the bit that wins cases. We considered redeployment, and here's why it wasn't possible. We considered the medical evidence, and here's how it shaped our decision. A tribunal is asking whether you acted reasonably, and reasonableness lives in what you weighed up. 3. Follow the same process every single time. Disciplinary, grievance, absence, dismissal. Consistency is itself evidence of fairness, and inconsistency is the first thing a decent solicitor will look for. 4. Take occupational health advice on anything health related rather than making assumptions about what somebody can or can't do. And if the advice you get back is vague, go back and ask, because that's exactly what the BBC didn't do. See the last 10 minutes. 5. Give people a fair hearing and a genuine right of appeal. Let them put their side, actually consider it, and offer a proper, impartial appeal. A well-run appeal can repair an earlier wobble and shows you took it seriously. 6. Keep the paperwork somewhere you can find it in a year. If it's in one manager's inbox and that manager leaves in January, you haven't got a record, you've got a rumour. And this is exactly why I've spent the year building Cake, Coffee and Compliance, our manager training programme, because most of that list happens at manager level rather than yours. Session seven is probation and short service, which is where a startling number of six-month claims are going to come from. And there are dedicated sessions on record keeping and running a fair process, each one handing over a real template your managers keep. 21-hour sessions on Tuesday mornings across the year, and block one starts on Tuesday the 13th of October. It's all at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash managers. And if you'd like an honest picture of how your records and processes would hold up under a six month window, start with the free HR Health Check. Five to seven minutes, instant red, amber, green, and a report in your inbox. It's at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash hr health check. The swarm. Four myths, and I hear all of them. Myth

Four Myths That Create Claims

Kate 23:30

one This only matters if I'm sacking someone. Somebody? No. Six months applies to most claims, and plenty of them have nothing to do with dismissal. Discrimination, unlawful deductions, failure to make reasonable adjustments, all sorts. The person who's still working for you has six months too. Myth 2. We had a genuine reason, so the process doesn't really matter. Subtitles Embrace Yourself. The last employer who thought that spent £329,000 finding out. That is a slightly aggressive way of putting a correct point. Yes, the reason has to be genuine. It also has to be arrived at fairly, and the fairness is what gets examined. A good reason reached badly is still a risk, and hoping to be saved in the round is not a strategy. Myth 3. If I don't write it down, there's nothing to be used against me. I promise you this is backwards. The absence of a record doesn't protect you, it removes your only account of what happened. The other side will have their version, in detail, written up months ago by somebody advising them. If you've got nothing, their version is the only one in the room. Myth 4. The Acres Code is only guidance, so it doesn't really bite. An unreasonable failure to follow it can add up to 25% to a tribunal award. Guidance with a 25% price tag is not really optional, and the new draft code is worth reading now so you're not surprised later. The honeycomb. Your quick action list. Six things and none of them take long. One,

Six Quick Actions Before October

Kate 25:18

diarise the 1st of October for England, Wales and Scotland, and remember it bites where the relevant event happens on or after that date. Anything from September keeps the old three-month clock. If you employ people in Scotland, note the 9th of November for breach of employment contract claims. 2. Pull the file on your last two difficult people decisions and see whether someone else could reconstruct them today. That five-minute test will tell you everything. 3. Agree one simple rule with your managers this week. Any conversation that could ever matter gets a short dated note that day saved where the business can find it. 4. If you have anyone on long-term sick, book occupational health rather than wondering, get the advice in writing and make your decisions from it. 5. Have a look at the draft ACAS code before the consultation closes at 11.59 tomorrow night, Wednesday, the 23rd of September, and respond if you've got a view worth sharing. Two others while you're in the mood. Holiday pay compliance and enforcement closes at 11.59 tonight and workplace monitoring technologies closes at 11.59 on the 30th. 6. Take the free HR Health Check at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash HR-health-check and find out how your records would actually hold up. Flying the hive. So, six months to claim from the 1st of October across England, Wales and Scotland for anything

Training And The Free HR Health Check

Kate 26:56

that happens on or after that date. It doesn't change how you should treat your people. It changes how long you're exposed afterwards and how long your account of what happened needs to stay standing. And the reassuring flip side is that the fix is completely in your control. And it's small. A dated note. The reasons you decided. What you considered and set aside. Occupational health when health is involved. The same process every time. That's it. That's the defence, and it costs you a few minutes rather than a compliance department. I'd add one more thing because it's the real lesson from both named cases. Good documentation isn't about building a case against your team. It's the opposite. It's what stops decisions being made on suspicion and vibes, and it's what protects a decent employee from being judged on 30 seconds of footage nobody bothered to explain. Fair process protects both of you every single time. Good practice really is financial self-defence, and it's also just the right way to treat people. If you'd like a hand with any of it, take the free HR Health Check at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash hr-health dash check. Get your managers a place on cake, coffee and compliance at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk slash managers, or just email me at buzz at kateunderwoodhr.co.uk and tell me what's worrying you. No jargon, no pressure, just a proper conversation. Until next time, keep buzzing, look after your people, and write it down while you still remember it. Kettle on.