Mixed messaging risk for HR as trade unions gain digital access rights in UK

The Employment Rights Bill has almost completed its passage through Parliament, and attention has now turned to implementation. Four government consultations are underway, covering flexible working, carer’s leave, pregnancy and maternity protections, and trade union rights. That last one – rights of access – is getting most of the attention, and for good reason. It’s a major operational shift for employers and unlike anything we’ve seen before in UK industrial relations. For the first time, trade unions will have a statutory right to request access to workplaces – physical and digital – whether those workplaces are unionised or not. And it’s the digital side that’s generating the most questions. What exactly will digital access mean in practice? We’ll speak to an employment lawyer helping clients prepare.

So far, the signs point to a broader and more flexible model of engagement. Unions could potentially request access to company intranets, email systems, messaging platforms, even video tools like Teams or Zoom. 

The consultation sets out a clear expectation that employers will engage constructively with digital access requests and respond quickly – possibly within five working days. Delays, blanket refusals, or a failure to take requests seriously could lead to terms being imposed by the Central Arbitration Committee – and for serious or repeated breaches, financial penalties of up to £75,000 or even £150,000.

What’s not yet clear is the level of control employers will have over the content, the frequency of union messages, or the boundaries between union communications and official HR messaging. Those details will come in secondary legislation after the consultation has finished but employers with dispersed or remote workforces need to start planning now.

So let’s get a view on this. Lucy Townley is an employment lawyer based in our Edinburgh office and she has been working with a number of clients to help them prepare for what’s coming: 

Lucy Townley: “So digital access is probably the biggest shift for employers here I'd say. We're moving into a new territory altogether, being that unions are able to request access to internal communication platforms. We don't know the details of that yet, but that might involve posting content on the intranet or sharing messages via email, for example, and it's really important for employers to think now about how that would work, technically, logistically, and from a governance perspective. So the questions that that we're discussing with clients at the moment are, how will access be granted? And in some organisations can access even be granted? So I'm thinking there of situations where there's a specific security concern about access to internal platforms, for example. The other questions are, who uploads the content? Is it that trade unions draft it and then the employer uploads it, or does the trade union have the right to upload the content directly? Can the content be reviewed by the employer and perhaps approved or suggested edits given first? We need to understand those questions and we're hopeful that soon there will be rules, or more specific guidance, about what can and cannot be shared and how this will work in practice. What I'm saying to clients at the moment is we have to really make sure that these issues and these types of information are clearly labelled as union material. So we need to think carefully about how the information will be divided on the web pages to ensure that it's clear what is union material and what has come from the employers and these big questions are all things that can be worked through in advance so, ideally, with input from the IT teams, from the internal comms teams, and with your legal team to try to ensure how to get this right. We need to start working through all of these questions now to decide what's technically possible and how we can put in place governance structures for this kind of totally new and undefined concept.”

Joe Glavina: “A key issue for HR will be how trade union content will be presented alongside internal content. What are you saying to clients about that?”

Lucy Townley: “So the crucial point for employers to consider here is that once unions start using internal channels it might be easy for staff to start confusing the messaging, especially if it's not clearly presented, and that might be a particular problem if the content is contradictory, or if the trade union messaging is perhaps critical of the employer. So employers should think about how to present the content in a way which makes really clear where it's coming from. So it might be that we have, for example, dedicated sections of the intranet for trade union information, or that we label it properly and design it in a way that makes it stand out as being union correspondence. Alongside that, as ever, it's a really good idea that employers are reinforcing their internal communications channels. So we want employees to know where they can go for updates, who they can talk to and, ultimately, they want to know that management is still listening to them and their views, In that way we can ensure that there's balance and clarity between the information that's being provided to employees all of which, I think, has to be balanced quite carefully with having too much information available to employees because sometimes, we know from other clients, that leads to a lack of engagement where there's so much information out there that employees don't know what to look at or what to listen to. So all of these issues have to be balanced quite carefully, I think, and that's even more likely to be the case when there's digital access rights for trade unions.”

All four consultations were published on 23 October 2025 and are open for comment. The two consultations on trade union rights – one on access to workplaces and the other on the duty to inform workers of their right to join a union – both have short timescales, closing on 18 December. If you want to respond you can do so online via the gov.uk website and we’ve included a link to it in the transcript of this programme for you. 

- Links to the Government’s two trade union related consultations:
Make Work Pay: trade union right of access
Make Work Pay: duty to inform workers of their right to join a union