There’s a bill quietly gathering momentum in Westminster, and if you run a business with remote or hybrid staff, you should already have it on your radar. The right to switch off has moved from a talking point to a genuine legislative pressure point in the UK, with trade unions, employment lawyers, and the previous and current administrations all weighing in. Ireland introduced its own statutory code in 2021. Belgium legislated for it in 2022. The UK has been slower, but that gap is closing.
I’ve spoken to a number of small and mid-sized business owners over the past few months who simply aren’t aware of where this is heading. The right to switch off UK employment law remote work conversation is no longer hypothetical. Waiting until it’s legally compelled before updating your communication policies and employment contracts is the kind of decision that tends to look very avoidable in retrospect.
What the right to switch off actually means
The core idea is straightforward: employees should not be expected to respond to work communications outside of their contracted hours. That means emails at 10pm, Slack messages on a Saturday, or Teams pings at 6am are not just poor management practice, they could become the subject of formal complaint and, eventually, legal action.
The Labour government included right-to-disconnect provisions in its Employment Rights Bill, which received its second reading in late 2024 and has been progressing through Parliament since. The bill doesn’t hand employees an immediate statutory right to ignore their managers, but it does direct ACAS to develop a statutory code of practice on the matter. A statutory code doesn’t carry the force of criminal law, but employment tribunals must take it into account when assessing cases. Tribunals can also uplift compensation by up to 25% if an employer unreasonably fails to follow it. That changes the calculus considerably.
Why remote and hybrid work makes this urgent
Pre-pandemic, the boundary between office hours and home life was largely self-policing. The commute functioned as a natural buffer. Remote work removed that buffer entirely, and the data since then has been consistent: remote workers, on average, work longer hours than their office-based counterparts, and a significant proportion receive work communications well into the evening.
For businesses that moved to hybrid models quickly in 2020 and 2021, many never updated their communication norms to reflect the new reality. Expectations that were fine in an office, where everyone left at 6pm, became genuinely oppressive when applied to someone working from a spare bedroom. I’d argue that most employers didn’t intend to create that pressure, but intent doesn’t move the needle in an employment tribunal.
The right to switch off UK employment law remote work framework will almost certainly treat asynchronous communication differently from synchronous demands. Sending an email at 11pm is not the same as calling someone at 11pm. But if you’re building a culture where staff feel obligated to respond to that 11pm email by midnight, the distinction matters less than you might hope.
What to update in your communication policies now
The practical response isn’t to wait for the ACAS code and then scramble. The sensible move is to review and tighten your internal communication policies while the legislative framework is still being finalised. Here’s where I’d start.
Define your expected response windows
Put in writing, clearly, what “urgent” means. If your business genuinely operates across time zones or has on-call requirements, document those explicitly and compensate accordingly. If it doesn’t, your staff have every right to assume that messages sent outside contracted hours can wait until the morning.
Review your employment contracts
Contracts that include vague language around “flexibility” or “meeting the needs of the business” may need tightening. A clause that was harmless when written in 2019 could be problematic under an evolving statutory code. Get employment law advice if you’re uncertain, but at a minimum, make sure your contracts specify contracted hours clearly and don’t imply any implicit duty to be contactable beyond them.
Audit your communication tools
Slack, Teams, and similar platforms have notification settings that most people never configure. As an employer, you can set expectations around how these tools are used. Some businesses now configure notifications to automatically mute outside of working hours at the organisation level. That’s a low-cost signal with a real cultural impact. If your business already uses an internal knowledge base to reduce dependency on key staff, you may already be reducing the volume of out-of-hours pings that happen simply because information isn’t easily accessible during the day.
Train your managers
This is the piece most businesses miss. A policy document means nothing if line managers routinely email at 9pm and expect replies by breakfast. Manager behaviour sets the cultural norm. Training doesn’t need to be expensive or lengthy; it just needs to be explicit about what the business expects and why it matters.
The business case beyond compliance
I want to make one point that sometimes gets lost in the compliance framing. The right to switch off isn’t just a legal risk to manage; there’s a genuine commercial upside to getting this right.
Burnout is expensive. The CIPD’s 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work report found that presenteeism and stress-related absence continue to cost UK employers billions annually. Staff who feel they can’t disconnect are more likely to suffer from chronic fatigue, make more errors, and leave sooner. High turnover in remote teams is particularly costly because the informal knowledge transfer that happens in an office simply doesn’t occur, which is precisely why businesses are investing in tools like asynchronous video to replace internal meetings and reduce the synchronous load on staff.
Businesses that get ahead of right-to-disconnect expectations also tend to communicate better during contracted hours. When everyone knows that a message sent at 8pm will be read tomorrow, they become more deliberate about what they send and when. That clarity reduces noise and improves the quality of internal communication across the board.
What’s coming and when
The ACAS code of practice is expected to be published for consultation once the Employment Rights Bill receives Royal Assent, which most employment lawyers expect in 2026. Businesses will likely have a transition period before the code becomes formally applicable. That transition window is your opportunity to act deliberately rather than reactively.
My read of the situation is that the final code will distinguish between sectors with genuine operational need for out-of-hours contact (healthcare, emergency services, certain client-facing financial services roles) and those where it has simply become a bad habit. If you’re in the latter camp, the time to self-correct is now.
For those managing the broader shift in how teams operate, it’s worth considering how right-to-switch-off expectations interact with the wider employment cost pressures UK employers are managing in 2026. Getting communication policies right is one of the lower-cost levers available, and it tends to have a disproportionate effect on retention.
The direction of travel is clear. The question is whether your business shapes its own policies now, or has them shaped for it later.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the right to switch off currently law in the UK?
Not yet as a standalone statutory right. The Employment Rights Bill includes provisions directing ACAS to produce a statutory code of practice on the right to disconnect. Once that code is in force, employment tribunals can factor it into decisions and uplift compensation by up to 25% where employers have unreasonably ignored it.
What counts as a breach of the right to switch off for remote workers?
The exact definition will depend on the ACAS code once published, but the general principle is that expecting employees to respond to work communications outside their contracted hours, particularly repeatedly or under implicit pressure, would be considered a breach. This applies equally to remote and office-based staff.
Do employers need to update employment contracts before the law changes?
It’s strongly advisable. Contracts with vague language around availability or flexibility may already expose employers to claims under existing working time and constructive dismissal law. Tightening contracts now reduces that risk and makes any future compliance with the statutory code easier.
How does the right to switch off apply to on-call or shift workers?
Workers with genuine on-call requirements can have those obligations written explicitly into their contracts, with appropriate compensation. The right to disconnect is broadly aimed at roles where out-of-hours contact has become an informal expectation rather than a formal contractual condition.
What practical steps can UK businesses take now to prepare for right-to-switch-off legislation?
Businesses should review and update internal communication policies, define expected response windows in writing, configure notification settings on tools like Slack and Teams to mute outside contracted hours, and train line managers to model the right behaviour. An employment law solicitor can advise on any contract changes needed.