Labour promised staff a say before bosses bring in workplace surveillance. Now that promise is one option of three

This desk follows commitments from the moment they are made to the moment they are kept or quietly set down.

The commitment

The Plan to Make Work Pay, the programme behind the Employment Rights Act 2025, said that the introduction of surveillance technologies in the workplace should be subject to consultation and negotiation, with a view to agreement with trade unions, or with elected staff representatives where there is no union. The consultation the government published on 8 July restates that commitment in its own foreword.

What the consultation offers

The consultation sets out three routes and says none is a settled preference.

Option A is a statutory code of practice, backed by guidance. It would create no new legal obligations. A tribunal could take it into account, and could increase an award by up to a quarter where an employer unreasonably ignored it, but only inside a claim a worker had already brought and won on other grounds.

Option B is the commitment itself: a legal duty to consult and negotiate before monitoring is introduced. The document is candid about its costs. It would need primary legislation, it could burden smaller firms, it might slow down technology that helps, and it is hard to define when a system that is introduced in stages has been introduced at all.

Option C is guidance only, with no new rights or remedies.

Then comes a sentence that matters more than any of the three. If the evidence does not show a clear problem, the document says, no intervention remains a legitimate outcome.

Who each option reaches

The consultation says monitoring is particularly high in ride hailing, delivery and logistics. It says Option B would most straightforwardly apply to employees, and that people who work through apps are typically not employees and are harder to organise. It says workers who are not employees can bring fewer kinds of tribunal claim, so a code would reach them less.

Two aims pulling apart

The foreword places the whole exercise inside the government's ambition for the country to be the fastest adopter of AI in the G7, and asks how the UK can lead in adopting these technologies, and whether regulation is needed to support that. Both aims are stated openly. They pull in different directions.

Who is running it now

The consultation was issued by the Department for Business and Trade, under the previous prime minister. After the July reshuffle, that department became part of the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. The consultation is still open, and responses still go to the addresses it gives.

What happens next

It closes at 11:59pm on 30 September. The document says the government will analyse the responses and publish a response. It does not say when.

This desk will be watching for three things: whether the response keeps the negotiation duty, whether it extends to workers who are not employees, and whether it says anything at all about stopping a system rather than consulting on one. We have put the first question to the department.