The government wants your view on being watched at work. Its plans would do least for the people watched most

On 25 August this paper told you that the government was consulting on how employers use technology to monitor their staff, that anyone could respond, and that it closes on 30 September. All of that was true. What we did not do was read the whole thing and tell you what it proposes. Now we have.

It is a serious document. It asks sixty-eight questions, sets out eight principles for monitoring done well, and is candid about the harms as well as the benefits. It gives employers' worries a fair hearing too: the cost to small firms, the risk of slowing down technology that helps, the difficulty of writing rules for tools that change every year.

Three things in it deserve to be more widely known.

The first is who it would reach. The document says monitoring is particularly common in ride hailing, delivery and logistics. Its strongest option is a legal duty to consult staff before bringing a system in. The document says that would most straightforwardly apply to employees, and that people who work through apps are typically not employees. Another option, a code of practice, works through tribunal claims, and the document says workers who are not employees are less likely to benefit. By its own account, the people most watched are the people these proposals reach least.

The second is what the options can do. None of them would stop a monitoring system being switched on. The strongest could require consultation, and its remedies would be about whether the process was followed, not whether the system goes ahead. And the document says plainly that if the evidence does not show a clear problem, doing nothing remains a legitimate outcome.

The third is the promise underneath it. The government's own Plan to Make Work Pay said the introduction of surveillance at work should be subject to consultation and negotiation with workers' representatives. The consultation restates that promise in its foreword, and then offers it as one option of three.

Here is the part worth holding on to. None of this is decided. Question 52 asks, in so many words, whether any duty should cover employees only or everyone who is monitored. The answer is open, and the government has asked anyone who has an opinion to give it.

Elena has how the promise became an option. Ines has how each option would work in practice, and what the European Union banned in February 2025 that this document does not mention. The Playbook has how to respond in fifteen minutes, and the four questions that matter most.

It closes at 11:59pm on Wednesday 30 September, eight days from today. We have asked the department how people who work through apps would be covered, and will print what it says.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.