The Employment Rights Act is the biggest shake-up in UK employment law for a generation, and plenty has already been written about what it does. The more useful question, if you are hiring senior HR, is what it means for the person you put in charge of handling it. The first wave of changes landed in April 2026, the heavier ones arrive in 2027, and between them they change what a good senior HR leader actually needs to be able to do.
The brief you wrote eighteen months ago may now be pointing at the wrong strengths. Here is what each of the main changes means, and where we would push harder in a search.
Day-one family leave
From April 2026, paternity leave and unpaid parental leave became day-one rights, with no qualifying service. It sounds like an administrative tweak, but it lands across policy, manager guidance, template documents and workforce planning at once, and it is HR that has to make it run. A senior HR leader who is long on strategy and short on operational grip will feel that quickly, usually in the small failures that follow when nobody owns the detail: a missed notice period, cover that was never arranged, a new parent given the wrong steer by a manager no one briefed. Cheap to get right, and expensive to leave to chance.
Statutory sick pay from day one
Statutory sick pay changed on the same date, tt is now paid from the first day of absence rather than the fourth, and the lower earnings limit has gone, bringing lower-paid staff who were previously excluded into scope. That is modest on paper and broad in practice, reaching everyone from the first morning they are off, and across a large or shift-heavy workforce the cost and the absence-management load are real. The person you hire has to see all of it, the operational ripple, the cost line, the systems that track it and the finance conversation that follows, because senior HR is a commercial job and the leaders who thrive in it carry the people case and the numbers together.
The doubled collective redundancy award
This is the change that matters most for a senior HR hire, and the one most likely to catch out a weak appointment. From April 2026, the maximum protective award for failing to consult properly on a collective redundancy doubled from 90 to 180 days’ pay per affected employee. Because it is calculated per head, the exposure on any sizeable restructure can reach seven figures: a programme affecting thirty people can jump from around £185,000 to £370,000 on process alone.
Restructuring risk has doubled overnight, and it sits precisely where employee relations depth lives. A CPO who shines on culture, talent and employer brand but is thin on collective consultation is now a real liability, because getting a collective redundancy wrong has never cost more. If you are hiring senior HR into a business that might restructure, employee relations is no longer a nice-to-have on the brief; it is near the top of it. It is also easy to test: ask a candidate to walk you through the last collective consultation they ran, and within minutes you will know whether they have done it for real or only read about it.
What is coming in 2027
The Employment Rights Act saves its heaviest changes for 2027. From January the qualifying period for unfair dismissal falls from two years to six months, and the cap on unfair dismissal compensation goes altogether. Today that cap is the lower of £118,223 or a year’s pay; for a departing director on a large package that is closer to a floor than a ceiling, and once it is gone the awards for senior, high earners are effectively uncapped. That changes the arithmetic of every senior exit.
Two things follow for hiring. Anyone you appoint from the middle of 2026 will have unfair dismissal protection from January 2027, so probation and early performance management have to be done properly from the start rather than patched together later. And the senior HR leader you bring in now is the one who has to build that discipline before the deadline, the documentation, the manager training, the hard conversations had early rather than late. The businesses that come through 2027 well will be the ones that used 2026 to prepare rather than to catch their breath.
What to weight in a search now
None of this pushes culture, transformation and talent aside. They are still the core of a strong senior HR leader, and the best people carry them alongside everything else. But the Employment Rights Act has shifted the balance. Employment-law literacy and genuine employee-relations strength have moved from useful to essential, and the readiness to challenge the business on process, and to slow it down when consultation demands it, is now part of the job at the top. The strategic HR leader is still the goal; the difference is that the version who can also steer through a tightening legal landscape, and who builds process discipline by instinct, is worth considerably more than the one who cannot.
So be honest, as you write the brief, about which of these your shortlist can actually show. A polished strategic narrative interviews well. Harder to test, and far more useful right now, is whether someone has genuinely run a difficult restructure, held their nerve through a process, and can talk about employment law as fluently as they talk about employer brand. That is what we dig into on your behalf.
If you are making a senior HR hire in this climate and want a straight read on whether a candidate has the employee relations and employment-law depth the next two years will demand, that is a conversation we have most weeks. Get in touch with James Cumming at re:find. One caveat, plainly: this is general comment on the hiring market, not legal advice, so take proper advice on how the Act applies to you.