From October an employment dispute can arrive six months late. Would your records survive the wait?

For as long as most owners have been employing people, a workplace dispute had a short fuse: three months, less a day, from the dismissal or the incident it complains about. If nothing had landed by then, it almost never would. From 1 October 2026 the fuse doubles.

Parliament approved the regulations in the summer. They extend the tribunal time limit from three months to six for a long list of claims, and the government intends the wider Employment Rights Act 2025 extension, which covers the big ones such as unfair dismissal and discrimination, to arrive alongside. The new limit applies where the act complained of happens on or after 1 October; anything wholly before that date keeps the old three months. Where a claim is about a series of acts, the last one in the series is what counts.

There is a second number that gets less attention. Since 1 December 2025, Acas early conciliation can run for up to twelve weeks, and it pauses the clock while it runs. Put the two together and the first formal notice of a dispute can reach you the best part of nine months after the event it concerns.

6 months: The tribunal time limit for most claims from 1 October 2026, up from three
12 weeks: Acas early conciliation since December 2025, which pauses the clock on top

None of that is a reason to panic, and this is not a piece about employment law tactics; we are not employment lawyers and our sister practice is not either. It is a piece about what nine months does to evidence, because that part is a systems question, and the systems are where we spend our days.

Memory was doing more work than you think

At three months, a dispute is recent. The supervisor who saw the incident still works for you and still remembers it. The phone with the messages on it has not been replaced. Everyone's account of the meeting roughly agrees, because the meeting was last quarter.

At nine months, some of those people have left. The phone has been upgraded and wiped. The manager's recollection has quietly reorganised itself around what they now believe happened. This is not dishonesty; it is what memory does, and it is why disputes are decided on records. The record stops being something that supports the account and becomes the only account there is.

Which raises the practical question: where, in your business, does that record live? For most small firms the honest answer is a mixture of places, several of which are on timers.

The records on timers

The leaver's mailbox is the sharpest one. In Microsoft 365, deleting a user's account puts their mailbox on a 30-day countdown, after which it is gone. The natural moment to delete the account is the week they leave, because that frees the licence you are paying for. So the standard leaver process destroys, inside a month, the mailbox most likely to matter in a dispute with that same leaver, who now has half a year to decide whether there is one.

Then there are the others. The shift swap that was agreed in a WhatsApp thread on somebody's personal phone. The rota that lives in a spreadsheet which gets saved over itself every week, so the version that shows who was actually working that Tuesday no longer exists. The Teams chat where the warning was given informally, sitting under whatever retention setting someone chose for tidiness. CCTV and door-entry systems that overwrite on a loop measured in weeks.

Each of these is fine as a way of running a business day to day. Each is a poor place for the only surviving account of a disputed event to live, and after October the surviving is the hard part.

Keeping everything is the wrong lesson

The reflex response is to keep everything forever, and it is wrong twice over.

UK GDPR expects you to keep personal data no longer than you need it, and a business that hoards every message indefinitely has swapped one exposure for another. Hoarding also fails on its own terms: if a dispute does come, you have to find and disclose what you hold, and ten years of undifferentiated mailbox is where relevant records go to hide.

The answer is duller than either extreme. Decide what you keep and for how long, on purpose, and let the system enforce it. Six or seven years covers most employment and tax purposes; your accountant or solicitor can tell you the right figure for your situation. The point is that the number should be a decision, not an accident of default settings.

An afternoon of settings

In a Microsoft 365 estate, most of this is configuration rather than expense. Retention policies, included in the Business Premium licence many small firms already pay for, will keep mail and Teams messages for a period you choose even if a user deletes them, and can delete on schedule at the end of it. A one-line addition to the leaver process says the mailbox is preserved before the account is removed, which takes minutes and costs nothing but the memory to do it.

01List where employment decisions actually get recorded in your firm, including the informal places
02Change the leaver process so mailboxes and files are preserved before the account goes
03Put a retention policy on mail and chat with a period you chose deliberately
04Move working conversations about staff off personal phones and into a channel the business controls
05Note what overwrites on a cycle, and decide whether the cycle is long enough now

The spreadsheet with no history is its own subject, and we have written about when a spreadsheet should become a system before. The short version here: anything that decides pay, shifts or discipline should keep its versions, and a shared file saved over itself does not.

If a claim ever comes, a solicitor argues it from whatever records exist. Whether they exist was settled months earlier, in the settings nobody looked at. That half is fixable this side of October, and we can help if the settings are not where you want to spend an afternoon.

We work with businesses across Knutsford, Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Stockport and Warrington, and remotely for clients anywhere in the UK.