From 30 October, a recognised route into the workplace for UK unions can run through Teams, Slack and the staff email lists. The duty to tell every worker they can join a union follows in January. Neither is a communications question. Both are questions about identity, permissions and data that most HR systems are not set up to answer.
Two pieces of the UK's Employment Rights Act programme landed in the space of a week, and together they change the status of tools most organisations have treated as discretionary.
The first is the new statutory right of access for trade unions, which government guidance says starts on 30 October 2026, subject to parliamentary approval. A union can ask for access that is physical, digital or a combination of the two. The employer has 15 working days to respond, and the parties then have 25 working days to negotiate an agreement. Where they cannot agree, the union can take the matter to the Central Arbitration Committee, which cannot impose an agreement on an employer with fewer than 21 workers. Breaches can attract penalties of £75,000, then £150,000, then £500,000 for repeat breaches, according to Lewis Silkin's analysis of the final framework.
Digital access is not left vague. It covers "channels such as emails, messaging systems or online meetings", and the expectation is that it mirrors the channels the employer normally uses to communicate with its staff. Employers cannot be required to hand over workers' personal contact details without consent.
The second is the government's response, published on 25 September, on the duty to inform workers of their right to join a union. The government will supply a standard statement that employers "may not amend except to add specific workplace information". New workers receive it with their written statement of employment particulars. Existing workers receive it directly each year by 5 April, or it can be kept "continuously and reasonably available" with an annual reminder telling them where it is. Where the unions that hold recognition or an access agreement change, the statement has to be reissued within one month. Government guidance now gives 1 January 2027 as the start date, later than first planned, with regulations expected in November and the first annual deadline on 5 April 2027.
The engagement stack is now partly statutory
For a decade, the employee experience stack (the intranet, the collaboration suite, the all-staff distribution lists, the employee app) has been run as an engagement investment. Its configuration was a matter of preference: who can post, who can create channels, which guests are allowed in.
Those preferences now sit underneath legal obligations. If a union negotiates digital access, someone has to provision it. That means deciding whether a union official gets a guest account in the tenant, which teams or channels they can reach, whether they can post to all-staff lists or only to the relevant group, and how long the access lasts. In most organisations those decisions belong to IT administrators working from security policies that were written with suppliers and customers in mind, not unions.
Employee relations will negotiate the agreement. IT will implement it. Neither function currently owns the whole of it, and the 15-working-day response window is short for an organisation discovering that.
Which workers, exactly?
Both measures quietly depend on a data point that many UK HR systems hold badly or not at all: which union arrangement applies to which worker.
Digital access is negotiated for a group of workers. To give a union access to "the relevant workers" through a messaging channel, the employer needs a reliable list of who those workers are, and a dynamic group in the collaboration tool that updates as people join, move and leave. The duty to inform has the same dependency. The statement must list the recognised unions and access agreements that apply, and it must be reissued within a month when they change. That is an event-driven obligation. It needs the HRIS to know about recognition changes and to trigger a reissue to the right population.
In organisations with formal collective bargaining, bargaining-unit membership is often recorded somewhere. In many others it lives in a spreadsheet held by employee relations, inferred from job codes and sites, or not recorded at all because nobody needed it in a system.
Where the obligations land
Requirement | System that carries it | Question to settle now |
|---|---|---|
Respond to an access request within 15 working days | Employee relations case tracking | Who receives a request, and who signs off a digital access proposal? |
Provide digital access through normal channels | Collaboration suite, email, identity management | What guest, channel and posting rights would a union official get? |
Reach the right group of workers | HRIS, plus dynamic groups in the collaboration tool | Is bargaining-unit or site membership a maintained field? |
Protect personal contact details | HRIS privacy settings | Can access be given without exposing personal email or phone numbers? |
Issue the statement to new starters | Onboarding document pack | Is the government template locked, with only workplace details editable? |
Keep it "continuously and reasonably available" | Intranet, with an annual reminder | Can you evidence availability and the reminder if challenged? |
Reissue within a month of a recognition change | HRIS event or workflow | What triggers the reissue, and to whom? |
Editorial mapping, not legal guidance. Dates and details are subject to the final regulations and code of practice.
The monitoring question nobody wants to raise
Many large employers run communication compliance or data-loss tools that scan messages in their collaboration suite. Few have asked what happens when a union is using that suite under a statutory access agreement. Scanning, flagging or retaining union communications in the ordinary way may be defensible for security reasons. It may also look, to a tribunal or the CAC, very much like surveillance of union activity. This is a question for counsel before access is granted, not after a complaint.
It sits alongside a broader point HRHubsMedia has made before about employee monitoring: the configuration of a monitoring tool is a policy decision, whether or not anyone signed it off as one.
What this means for people leaders
Before 30 October
Name a single owner for access requests, with IT and legal on a fixed response path inside the 15-working-day window.
Write a standard digital-access configuration in advance: guest model, channels, posting rights, duration, logging.
Find out whether your HRIS can say which union arrangement covers each worker. If it cannot, fix the field before January, not after the first reissue is missed.
Decide, with counsel, how monitoring and retention tools treat union channels.
Build the new-starter statement into onboarding as a locked document, and set up the annual reminder with evidence that it was sent.
None of this requires new software. It requires the people who negotiate with unions and the people who administer the tenant to be in the same room before the first request arrives, which in many organisations will itself be new.
Sources. Duty-to-inform provisions from the government response of 25 September 2026. Start dates, response and negotiation windows, and the 21-worker threshold from business.gov.uk guidance updated 25 September 2026. Definition of digital access, CAC referral window and penalty levels from Lewis Silkin, 21 September 2026. The access regime is subject to parliamentary approval and the duty-to-inform regulations had not been laid at the time of writing. HRHubsMedia is independent journalism, not legal or procurement advice. Corrections are made openly on this page.
