On 8 July an MP asked for a duty on employers to say when they are using AI on staff. The same afternoon, the government published a consultation asking whether there should be one.

In Westminster Hall on 8 July, Neil Duncan-Jordan raised the societal impact of AI and asked ministers for two specific things. A duty on employers to disclose their use of AI, and a right for a workforce to be consulted and to negotiate over how it is brought in. He cited the Trades Union Congress and the Employment Rights Act 2025 in support. The minister answered the debate without granting either.

On the same day, the Department published a consultation on workplace monitoring technologies, under the Make Work Pay banner. It covers surveillance tools, algorithmic management systems and AI-enabled decision-making at work. It asks whether further regulation is needed to improve transparency, worker engagement and accountability. It sets out options, one of which is primary legislation requiring employers to consult and negotiate with unions or elected staff representatives before bringing these systems in. That is close to what was asked for in the Hall that morning.

The consultation proposes no immediate change to the law. It closes on 30 September 2026.

Following a thread means noting when a question is answered somewhere other than where it was asked. The answer to Duncan-Jordan existed in a document published the same day, and neither the debate nor the document mentioned the other.

It also means noting who is waiting. The Trades Union Congress did not simply lobby for this: it drafted its own bill on artificial intelligence and employment rights, which is what a union body does when it concludes the ground is unregulated rather than badly regulated. UNISON campaigns on the same basis. When peers pressed ministers during the passage of the employment legislation for a position on AI at work, they were directed to a voluntary tool for AI management.

Now set that beside a duty that is already law. Section 58 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 requires employers to give every worker a written statement that they may join a trade union. It commences on 30 October 2026. Secondary legislation will set the content and timing, and guidance is expected in September.

Two questions about what a worker is entitled to know, both live in the same Parliament, in the same Act's orbit, on the same set of desks. One has a commencement date, a statutory instrument and guidance due next month. The other has a consultation that closes in five weeks and proposes nothing yet.

This is not a party point and I am not going to make it one. Every front bench of the last decade has treated the question of what a machine may decide about a worker as something to look at shortly. The current one has at least opened a document and put a date on it, which is more than its predecessors managed.

The thread runs on to 30 September, and then to whatever the Department does with what it receives. Somebody should go back and check. We will.