As you will be aware, several important trade union reforms took effect just a fortnight ago, on 18 February, including new rules affecting industrial action and dismissal protection. Many employers are reviewing their industrial relations arrangements in light of those changes.
That review is also prompting employers to look ahead to another major reform which is still to come, namely trade union digital access rights. Although digital access is not part of the February changes, and is expected in the next phase of trade union reforms, it is widely seen as one of the biggest operational challenges in the new regime because it will require careful planning before the first access request arrives. When the new rules are introduced, independent trade unions will be able to request access not just to physical workplaces but also to internal digital communication channels.
The Government consulted last year on how the new trade union access regime will work in practice, including both workplace and digital access rights, and that consultation closed in December. With the framework now taking shape, employers are beginning to consider how digital access would operate in their own organisations. Under the Government’s proposed framework, employers would have limited time to respond to an access request and, if agreement cannot be reached, the Central Arbitration Committee would be able to determine terms.
For many employers the challenge is not simply whether access will be granted, but how it will work in practice. Questions arise around technical access, governance arrangements and how trade union communications will be presented alongside internal messaging.
Those issues can be difficult to resolve quickly once a request has been made, which is why employers reviewing their industrial relations arrangements and are looking ahead to digital access and preparing their approach 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: “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.”
The Government consulted on the new trade union access regime last year, including digital access rights, and that consultation closed on 18 December 2025. The Government is now reviewing the responses and will in due course publish draft regulations and a statutory Code of Practice setting out how the new access rights will operate in practice. The Government’s published implementation timetable indicates that these access measures are intended to take effect in October 2026, with further detail expected during the course of the year, and as soon as that happens we will report on this again.
– Link to the Government consultation: Make Work Pay: trade union right of access