Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, with reference to the Retained EU Law Bill, whether her Department plans to (a) retain, (b) replace or (c) revoke the Working Time Regulations 1998.

We are consulting on proposals to improve how the Working Time Regulations 1998 operate without impacting the rights that really matter to workers. This Government has no intention of abandoning our strong record on workers’ rights, having raised domestic standards over recent years to make them some of the highest in the world.

We will be consulting on proposals to remove retained EU case law that imposes time-consuming and disproportionate requirements on business for working hour records to be kept for almost all members of the workforce, which could save employers around £1bn a year. The consultation also proposes to merge the two separate annual leave entitlements into one pot of statutory annual leave, while maintaining the same amount of statutory annual leave entitlement overall, and to introduce rolled-up holiday pay, so that workers can receive their holiday pay with each payslip.

The consultation can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/retained-eu-employment-law-reforms