What Acas wants to change about disciplinaries and grievances

The current Code is mostly about what happens once something has already gone formal. The new draft tries to pull the process back a step, so more concerns are handled early, informally and fairly, before anyone is sitting in a meeting with notes.

That is worth paying attention to even if you do not have an HR team. In a small business, the person running the company is usually the person handling the difficult conversation as well.

Why Acas is doing this now

Acas estimates that formal disciplinary and grievance procedures cost UK employers £2.36 billion a year. Informal resolution, which includes a straightforward conversation and, where it is used, workplace mediation, comes in at around £250 million.

Those figures come from Acas's own research on the cost of workplace conflict. They also say that 44% of working-age adults in Great Britain experienced conflict at work in the last 12 months.

None of that means every disagreement needs a process. Most concerns at work are small, and treating them like a tribunal case from day one often makes them worse. Acas is trying to write that common sense into the Code itself, rather than leaving it in a foreword that tribunals do not have to follow.

Employment tribunals already have to take the Code into account in relevant cases. They can increase or reduce an award by up to 25% if an employer or employee unreasonably fails to follow it. The size and resources of the business are taken into account, which matters if you are a team of ten rather than a company with a legal department.

That 25% adjustment is not new. It will matter more as other employment law changes come in, particularly around dismissal from January 2027.

What the draft Code actually changes

The biggest shift is that informal resolution would sit inside the statutory Code, not beside it.

Today, the Code's focus is formal procedures. The draft tells employers and workers to try to resolve concerns early where possible, and to do so promptly, without unreasonable delay. Informal steps should never, on their own, result in formal disciplinary action.

If a matter does need to go formal, both sides would be expected to say what they already tried informally, or why they did not try anything. That applies when an employer notifies someone of a disciplinary meeting, and when a worker puts in a written grievance.

A few other changes are worth knowing about.

On grievances, Acas wants written complaints to be short and clear. Workers would also be asked, where they can, to say how they would like the concern resolved, rather than waiting until a meeting to talk about outcomes. The idea is to make it easier for a small employer to understand the problem and respond quickly, instead of receiving a long document that takes weeks to unpick.