According to their manifestos, the three main parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats, are divided on the main issues as follows:

Zero hours contracts

• Conservative: maintain the ban on exclusivity clauses within zero hours contracts which was introduced by the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015
• Labour: ban zero hours contracts completely
• Liberal Democrat: maintain the ban on exclusivity clauses within zero hours contracts

Family-friendly leave and time off

• Conservative: introduce the right to a year’s unpaid leave to care for sick relatives, two weeks of child bereavement leave and the right to request unpaid time off for training
• Labour: increase paid paternity leave to a month, extend the period of maternity pay to 12 months, introduce statutory bereavement leave, extend the rights of employees to all workers, giving all workers equal rights from the beginning of their contract
• Liberal Democrat: make flexible working, paternity leave and shared parental leave “day one” rights and extend paid paternity leave to a month

Extension of discrimination protection

• Conservative: enforce ethnicity pay gap reporting, appoint an independent body to ensure compliance with pay gap reporting obligations, look into ways to make civil service recruitment more diverse and remove the requirement for employees to have suffered from a mental health condition for at least a year before they gain protection under the Equality Act
• Labour: ensure compliance with gender pay gap reporting
• Liberal Democrat: introduce pay gap reporting in relation to gender, race and sexual orientation, bring one million extra women into the workforce by 2025 and introduce name blind recruitment into the civil service.

Employment Tribunals

• Conservative: maintain fees
• Labour: abolish fees and extend the time period for claimants lodging a maternity discrimination claim from three to six months
• Liberal Democrat: abolish fees

Wages

• Conservative: increase the national living wage in line with average earnings by 2022
• Labour: raise the national living wage to at least £10 per hour by 2020 for all workers aged 18 and over, enforce a maximum pay ratio in public sector organisations of 20:1 (so if the lowest salary was £18,200, the highest possible salary would be £364,000), potentially increase statutory redundancy pay, end the 1% pay cap on public-sector pay and award these workers pay rises in line with inflation
• Liberal Democrat: end the 1% pay cap on public-sector pay and award these workers pay rises in line with inflation

The result of the election and its impact on employment law remains to be seen. We will keep you updated!