So having made a “right to disconnect” for workers a manifesto promise pre-election, the new government must now do the less glamorous work of turning a political sound-bite into actual law.
Early reports are not promising – they suggest a requirement to agree a code of conduct with your workforce in relation to out-of-hours contact, where breach is enforced not in its own right but as an incidental to claims relating to other unlawful conduct by the employer, very much like the Acas Code of practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures. So that would suggest straight away that there will be no actual right to disconnect, and that unwelcome out-of-hours contact could continue unabated unless and until the employer makes some other misstep. That seems likely just to further complicate many Tribunal claims for matters wholly unrelated to and unaffected by the extent of any out-of-hours contact. After all, if you could throw in such an allegation, why not? — you open up whole new vistas of litigation disclosure, cost and delay for your employer in laboriously knocking it all down again, and so would strengthen your bargaining position no end.