New UK Employment Law Pushes Avado to Retrain Managers

UK managers are about to become the most legally exposed people in any British company, and hardly any of them know it yet. The Employment Rights Act 2025, the biggest shake-up of UK employment law in a generation, arrives in stages across 2026 and 2027.

It makes claims easier to bring and costlier to lose, cutting the unfair-dismissal qualifying period, doubling the window for tribunal claims and scrapping the cap on payouts. 

Into that gap steps Avado, the UK's leading online HR training provider, which on 1 July launched HR Compliance for Managers, a CPD-certified course built with employment-law expert Amanda Chadwick.

The Fair Work Agency has been enforcing employment rights since April 2026, day-one paternity and sick-pay rights are in, and from October,, the duty to prevent sexual harassment hardens to "all reasonable steps".

The heaviest blow comes in 2027, when unfair-dismissal protection starts at six months rather than two years and the cap on payouts disappears, so a serious case could run to whatever a tribunal thinks fair.

Avado's HR Compliance for Managers is built to close that gap. The CPD-certified course runs six units over six hours, mixing expert video with scenarios, knowledge checks and templates, and walks managers through:

• The current legal landscape under the new Act
• Fair and legal hiring
• Managing performance and absence
• Disciplinary and grievance essentials
• Wellbeing and psychological safety
• Confident day-to-day compliance

The risk sits with managers

In a recent Avado survey of more than 500 HR professionals, employment-law essentials ranked as the top training priority for 2026. Avado has spent more than a decade running CIPD qualifications, so a move into short manager courses reads as a natural stretch of its base.

The reason it resonates is where the risk actually sits. Most of these decisions never reach HR. Managers hire, discipline, sign off absence, handle grievances and end contracts every day, usually with no formal grounding in the law behind those calls.

They are promoted for hitting targets, not for knowing where fair discipline ends and an unfair dismissal begins.

"HR compliance can no longer stop at the HR team's door," says Alexis Regan, Avado's Chief Executive Officer, in the launch announcement. "We're here to support everyone who manages people, wherever they sit in the organisation."

Alexis calls Amanda "one of the most trusted and engaging voices in UK employment law", a reputation built over 25 years advising business owners and representing them at tribunal.

A broadcaster and author, Amanda has made a career of turning dense employment law into something non-lawyers can act on.

Whether a six-hour course can close that gap is a question for employers. For people teams, the value is less the syllabus than the point behind it, that liability now has to be understood well beyond the HR desk. The exposure, either way, is already here.