Brexit’s effect on public sector and employment law tops agenda at PPMA seminar
HR professionals were yesterday warned they need to prepare for the worst-case scenario to avoid being left in the dust on Brexit day.
Speaking at the Public Service People Managers’ Association (PPMA) annual seminar, Joe Owen, researcher at the Institute for Government, stressed that the effects of Brexit could be felt particularly acutely by certain sub-sectors of the UK’s workforce.
Owen said that, while a predicted five to 10 per cent of the country’s workforce is made up of EU nationals, the proportion rises to around a third (30 per cent) for nurses.
He advised HR to “prepare for the worst” when Britain leaves the EU to avoid being at a “standing start”, adding that a “balance of speed and scrutiny” was key to managing the process in the public sector.
Speaking alongside Owen, Bridgend County Borough Council’s CEO, Darren Mepham, noted that Brexit could be an opportunity to revamp employment law to suit more modern working practices. “A lot of UK employment legislation was created at a time when it was relevant, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is now,” he said.
Brexit also featured heavily in Luke Menzies’ employment relations session later in the day. The director of Menzies Law reassured delegates that all EU employment law was already incorporated into UK law, and was therefore not dependent on Brexit.
Menzies also warned that employers that had started to tweak their recruitment practices following the Brexit vote could be opening themselves up to legal challenge. “There’s already been a reduction in the hiring of EU nationals [since the UK voted to leave the EU], but any changes employers make now surrounding this are potentially discriminatory, so UK employers are likely to have to wait until after [Brexit] before making any significant changes,” he said.
Meanwhile, Peter Cheese, CIPD chief executive and the conference’s keynote speaker, warned that future workplaces would need “more human” skills. “The skills needed most are ‘human’, such as empathy, but many value a worker’s competency in their job more than those skills,” he said. “The future of work will demand it even more.”
Cheese said the ever-increasing significance of workplace technology was affecting how workplaces operated. He highlighted the CIPD and Halogen’s most recent Employee Outlook report, which found that nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of employees were concerned at least part of their job could soon be automated.
“Technology can help us with some of today’s workplace challenges, as well as those in the future, including productivity,” Cheese said. “Although technology has the potential to reduce employee stress, we need to put the ‘human’ back into human resources.”
He also questioned how employers could balance tech-enabled employee data collection with retaining their workforce’s trust. “Employers must listening to their people and engage with them, but everyone is different and we need to rethink working relationships to reflect this,” he said.