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The UK Government has announced a significant change to public procurement rules that may have the effect of incentivising employers bidding for or renewing government contracts to recognise trade unions or grant them access to their workplaces. The move adds a commercial dimension to the new trade union reforms and workplace access regime under the Employment Rights Act 2025.
What has been announced?
Under new guidance published by the Cabinet Office, the weighting given to "social value” when evaluating bids for central government contracts worth more than GBP5 million will double from 10% to 20% . Companies bidding for those contracts will be assessed on whether they demonstrate “fair working conditions” and “fair pay”, and providing “access to trade union representation” is expressly identified as a factor that can attract higher scores.
Other measures that may earn social value credit include offering flexible working arrangements, paying more than the statutory minimum wage, promoting a positive workplace culture, creating and retaining high-quality jobs, providing training opportunities in areas with skills shortages, and offering placements and apprenticeships to young people.
Adding a commercial dimension to workplace access rules
The new procurement rules sit alongside the new conditions for statutory trade union recognition which took effect on 6 April 2026, and the new statutory workplace access regime due to come into force on 30 October 2026 (see our blogs Lowering the bar: UK union recognition gets easier and Opening the doors: a new era for UK union workplace access). Taken together, these reforms mean that employers bidding for public sector work may need to consider trade union representation and workplace access rights from both a compliance and commercial perspective.
While the detail remains to be worked through, the direction of travel appears to be that union access and engagement will form part of the wider assessment of workplace practices when public contracts are awarded.
Questions still to be answered
Full details of how “access to trade union representation” will be assessed in practice are not yet available. Key questions remain, including: how will contracting authorities verify that an employer provides genuine access to a union, and will a statutory workplace access agreement suffice, or will additional steps be required? How will the social value criteria interact with the new workplace access regime and Code of Practice? What level of union engagement will be needed to secure meaningful credit in the scoring process?
We will report further as the detail becomes available.
What should employers do now?
For employers already preparing for the statutory workplace access regime, the procurement announcement means that they should now be thinking not only about compliance, but also about whether their approach to trade union access and engagement could affect future bidding opportunities.
We have created a resource hub with practical guidance, insights and tools to help employers plan for, and navigate, the new access regime and other industrial relations reforms under the ERA 2025. You can explore the hub here: UK industrial relations reforms: what employers need to know
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
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