A month from today, the amount of time an ex-employee has to bring a tribunal claim doubles. Three months becomes six.
There is nothing to file, register or sign before 1 October. That is exactly why it will pass most businesses by. The work is quieter than that: making sure that if a claim lands next spring about something that happened this autumn, you can still show what you did.
Here is how to use the 30 days.
In short:
- Nothing legal needs changing. Your habits do.
- Spend week one finding out whether your records would actually stand up.
- Spend the rest closing the gaps you find.
- If you only do one thing, make it the first item below.
Week 1: find out where you actually stand
Do not start by fixing things. Start by testing whether you have a problem, because most owners are either fine or badly exposed, and guessing wastes the month.
The three leavers test. Pick the last three people who left your business, for any reason. For each one, try to produce today: why they left, what was said to them and when, and anything they raised on the way out. If you can do that in ten minutes for all three, you are in decent shape. If you are reconstructing it from memory or scrolling back through WhatsApp, that is your answer.
The current problems test. List anyone whose performance or conduct is worrying you right now. For each, is there anything in writing telling them so? If not, those are your live risks, because they are the exits most likely to happen in the next few months.
Week 2: fix the paperwork that goes stale
Records are only useful if they exist at the time. Once someone has left, it is too late to create them honestly.
Write down the concerns you have already raised verbally. Not a warning, not a formal process, just a short email confirming a conversation you have genuinely had. "Following our chat on Tuesday about the missed deadlines, I wanted to confirm what we agreed." Dated, factual, and enormously more useful than your recollection eight months from now.
Put a home in place for employment records. One folder per person. Contract, written statement of particulars, any meeting notes, any letters. It does not need to be software. It needs to be somewhere other than your inbox and your head.
Check your written statements of particulars exist. Every employee is entitled to one from day one. This is the single most common missing document in a small business, and it is a legal requirement rather than a nice to have.
Week 3: make sure the process would survive contact with reality
Read your own disciplinary and grievance procedure. If you have one, would you actually follow it? If you would not, it is a liability rather than a protection, because failing to follow your own policy is evidence of unfairness. If you do not have one, the Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures is the benchmark and it fits on a few pages.
Agree your minimum steps with anyone who manages people. Concern in writing, meeting, chance to respond, written decision, right of appeal. Five steps, and skipping them is the single most expensive mistake in UK employment law. We wrote about the five that cost small businesses the most.
Week 4: set the habits that outlast the deadline
Tell your managers what changes. One sentence is enough: from October, assume anything that goes wrong can come back at us for six months, so write it down at the time.
Decide how long you keep things. With a 6 month claim window and hearings often a year or more after that, records need to survive far longer than most small businesses keep them. Several years is sensible.
Diarise January 2027. That is when the qualifying period for unfair dismissal drops from 2 years to 6 months and the cap on compensatory awards goes. The habits you build this month are the ones that will matter then.
Why bother, when nothing is technically required
Because the change quietly moves risk from a place you can feel to a place you cannot.
At 3 months, a bad exit stays roughly within living memory. At 6 months, with the hearing later still, the manager who handled it may have left, the details blur, and the case turns on documents rather than recollection. The employers who come out of that well are not the ones with the best arguments. They are the ones who wrote things down at the time.
For the detail of what is changing and why, see our full guide to the new 6 month time limit.
This article explains UK employment law in plain English. It is general information, not legal advice. For advice on your specific situation, speak to a solicitor.
