Employment lawyers are briefing clients on claim volume. The systems consequence is quieter: the period in which evidence must still exist has doubled, and the deletion rules holding that evidence were configured against the old number.
Parliament approved the regulations on 23 June. From 1 October 2026, the standard time limit for bringing most employment tribunal claims moves from three months to six, completing one of the procedural reforms in the Employment Rights Act 2025.
The legal commentary since has concentrated, reasonably, on what a longer window does to claim volume and to settlement dynamics. That is the employer's cost question. There is a separate question that belongs to whoever owns the HR systems, and it has had almost no attention: for twice as long as before, an organisation will need to still be holding the material that decides whether it wins.
The retention assumption nobody wrote down
Very few HR retention schedules cite the three-month tribunal limit explicitly. What happened instead is subtler. Over years, a set of operational deletion behaviours settled at intervals that were comfortable precisely because they sat outside a three-month risk horizon, and nobody re-examined them because nothing ever went wrong.
Applicant records purged ninety days after a role closes. Interview scorecards that live in a recruiting module and disappear with the requisition. Collaboration-tool retention set to ninety days for storage reasons. Manager one-to-one notes in a performance tool with a rolling window. Access logs and system audit trails on short cycles. Each of those was a defensible decision under a three-month limit. From 1 October, several of them delete material inside a live claim window.
An employer that cannot produce the contemporaneous record does not lose the argument on the facts. It loses it on the absence of them.
This asymmetry matters more than the volume question. A claimant's account of a conversation in month five is memory, and so is the manager's. What settles the difference is a note written at the time, a rejection reason logged in the applicant tracking system, a message thread showing what was actually said. If those were routinely deleted at day ninety, the employer arrives with policy documents and recollection, and the claimant arrives with the same. The evidential advantage that a well-run HR function normally holds is a function of retention, not of being right.
Figure 1
Artefact | Where it usually lives | Typical deletion behaviour | Position from 1 October |
|---|---|---|---|
Rejection reasons and interview scorecards | Applicant tracking system | Purged with the requisition, often at 90 days | Can now be gone before a discrimination claim is even filed |
Manager notes and one-to-ones | Performance or HCM module | Rolling window; frequently overwritten | The primary contemporaneous record in most conduct and capability claims |
Messages and channel history | Collaboration platform | Tenant-level retention, commonly 90 days | Set by IT for storage reasons, not for a legal horizon that has just moved |
Grievance and investigation files | Case management | Usually retained well beyond six months | Largely unaffected — the part already treated as legal |
System and access logs | HRIS / IAM | Short cycles, sometimes 30 days | Relevant where who-saw-what is disputed |
The pattern is consistent. What is formally recognised as legal material is retained. What is treated as operational exhaust is not — and that is where the contemporaneous evidence sits.
The litigation-hold trigger is the harder problem
Retention periods are the visible half. The half that causes real difficulty is the trigger — the moment at which normal deletion is suspended for a specific individual.
In most organisations that trigger is a claim, or at best a formal grievance. Under a three-month limit that was workable, because the gap between an employment event and a claim was short. Under six months, an employee can leave in November and file in April, and everything that would have been suspended by a hold is subject to five months of routine deletion first.
The correction is to move the trigger earlier, to the event rather than the claim: a dismissal, a redundancy selection, a formal grievance, a protected disclosure, a settlement discussion that does not conclude. That is a policy decision with a systems dependency — it only works if the HRIS can flag an individual for suspended deletion across the recruiting, performance, case and collaboration systems at once, which in most estates it cannot do without manual coordination.
Five checks before 1 October
Find every deletion rule set at or near ninety daysacross the HR estate, including modules owned by IT rather than HR. The number is usually larger than the retention schedule implies, because operational defaults are not documented in it.
Re-baseline against the new limit plus the conciliation extension.Six months is the statutory window, not the outer edge of exposure — early conciliation and its extensions sit on top of it.
Move the litigation-hold trigger from claim to event.Define the events, and confirm who has the authority to apply a hold within twenty-four hours.
Test that a hold actually holds.Apply one in a test environment and confirm it survives in every system, including the collaboration tenant. Holds that exist only in the HRIS are the common failure.
Keep the data-minimisation argument straight.Retaining longer needs a documented lawful basis and a defined end date; "in case of a claim" is a legitimate purpose, but an unbounded extension of retention is a different compliance problem, not a solution to this one.
What this is really an instance of
Procedural law changes are treated as legal news and routed to counsel. But a limitation period is, operationally, a retention requirement wearing different language — it defines how long the organisation must be able to reconstruct what it did. When it changes, the system that has to change is not the policy library. It is the set of automatic deletion rules that nobody remembers configuring.
There are three weeks left to find them.
Sources and notes. Regulations extending employment tribunal time limits were approved in both Houses on 23 June 2026, with effect from 1 October 2026, extending the standard limit for most claims from three months to six under the Employment Rights Act 2025 framework. Transitional provisions determine how the new limit applies to events occurring before that date, and claims already out of time are not revived — the precise application to any individual matter should be confirmed with employment counsel. Retention behaviours described are typical configurations observed across HR technology estates, not a survey finding. Journalism, not legal advice. Corrections welcome.
