It rained all weekend. By Sunday night the dig was under water, the pour was never going to happen, and somebody sensibly decided Monday was a write-off. Two of the lads found out at ten past seven on Monday morning, in the site car park, from a site manager who felt bad about it.
They had already driven in. One of them had turned down a day elsewhere.
You have done this a hundred times and nobody has ever made a fuss. Work is weather-dependent, plans move, everyone understands. What is changing isn’t the weather. It is that a stood-down day is on its way to having a price, and a paper trail.
What is coming, in plain words
The Employment Rights Act 2025 became law last December. Most of it has nothing to do with you. Three parts of it do.
They apply to people on a zero hours contract — an arrangement where the firm promises no set number of hours and calls the person in as it needs them — and to people whose contract guarantees only a small number. The Act gives them three rights. After a run of weeks working regular hours, which the government would like to be twelve, a right to be offered a contract that guarantees those hours. A right to reasonable notice of the shifts they are asked to work. And a right to be paid something when a shift is cancelled, cut short or moved at short notice.
None of it is in force. The detail that matters — what counts as reasonable notice, what counts as short notice, how big the payment is — isn’t in the Act. It is being settled in a consultation that closes on the 25th of this month, and the government’s timetable puts these rights in 2027. One thing is already fixed: “short notice” cannot be set at more than seven days.
So this isn’t a fire. It is something you can see coming a year or so out, which is the only sensible time to look at it.
The part that catches construction
Your first thought will be that none of this touches you, because your labour is self-employed. Fair thought. Around two in five people in UK construction are self-employed rather than employed — thirty-nine per cent in the first quarter of this year, on official figures whose underlying survey has had known quality problems, so take it as an indication. Someone genuinely in business on their own account isn’t a worker and doesn’t get these rights.
Two things complicate that. Employment status is judged on what actually happens day to day, not on what the paperwork calls it. And agency labour is covered.
That second one matters. When an agency worker’s shift is cancelled at short notice, it is the agency that has to make the payment — but the agency can recover the cost from the hirer, to the extent the hirer caused it. The hirer is you: the firm whose site he was coming to. On notice it is more direct still. The default is that the hirer can be liable for failing to give reasonable notice, with ministers able to exempt certain kinds of hirer later.
So the cost of Monday morning doesn’t stay with the agency. It comes back to you on an invoice. And the argument about whether it should will turn on a question nobody in your office can answer today: when exactly did we tell him?
The plan lives in three places. None of them is a record
Ask a mid-market firm how it plans labour and you get the same answer in different words. A whiteboard in the office, jobs down one side and days across the top. A WhatsApp group, or four. And a contracts manager who holds most of it in his head and is the only person who genuinely knows what Tuesday looks like.
It works. It works because he is good at it.
What it cannot do is remember. A whiteboard shows the state of the world right now and nothing else. Rub a name out and the old plan is gone, and with it when it changed and who changed it. A WhatsApp message carries a timestamp, at least, but it sits on the phone of a site manager who may not be here in two years, buried in four hundred messages about deliveries. Neither is something to lean on when you are asked to show you gave four days’ notice.
The same blindness costs you money today, with no legislation involved. Two site managers ring the same groundworks gang for the same Monday and both are told yes. A bricklaying gang stands about until eleven because the scaffold alteration moved and nobody told them. None of it gets logged, so none of it lands in a job’s costs, so nobody fixes it.
What the small version looks like
One screen. Jobs down the side, the next fortnight across the top, names in the boxes. Everyone looks at the same board, site managers included, on a phone. When a name moves, the system stamps who moved it and when, and sends the message to the person affected — so the moment they were told is captured, because the telling happened there rather than in somebody’s memory.
That is the whole thing. Not a workforce management platform with a skills matrix and an appraisals module. A shared plan that keeps its own history.
I wouldn’t buy it for the legislation, mind. Buy it because you cannot see next Tuesday across all your sites at once, and that costs you standing time every month. The record is a by-product. Dates slip and consultations change the detail; the reason to know where your people are doesn’t depend on any of that.
Where this doesn’t apply
If everyone who works for you is directly employed on fixed weekly hours, the new rights are not aimed at you and the whiteboard is fine. If you run twenty people across two sites and one person books all of them, you don’t have a planning problem — you have a good planner, and software will get in his way. And if your labour is genuinely self-employed with no agency at all, the notice and cancellation rules are not your problem, though I would still ask what the double-bookings cost you.
It bites when you run several sites, with a mix of employed, agency and self-employed people, and more than one person is allowed to move a name.
If that sounds like your firm, get in touch.