From January an employee can claim unfair dismissal at six months. The file has to exist before then

Most small employers have never thought hard about the two-year rule, because two years is long enough that the question rarely arrives. Someone who is not working out generally goes in the first few months, well inside the window, and the ones still there after two years are the ones you want. From 1 January 2027 that window closes at six months.

We are not employment lawyers and neither is our sister accountancy practice. This is not a piece about how to dismiss somebody. It is about the thing a dismissal is defended with, which is a written record, and whether yours exists.

What actually changes

From 1 January 2027 the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal falls from two years to six months. The same drop applies to an employee's right to request written reasons for dismissal, and the qualifying period for dismissal on grounds relating to spent convictions goes altogether. The cap on the compensatory award a tribunal can make is removed at the same time.

The change applies in England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland has its own legislation and is not affected. Day-one protections against discrimination and the automatically unfair reasons are not changed by any of this; they were already day one.

The arithmetic catches people out. This is not a rule that starts counting in January. Anyone who has six months' service on 1 January has the protection on 1 January, which means everybody on your payroll who started before the beginning of July this year.

6 months: Qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal from 1 January 2027, down from two years
1 week: Statutory notice from one month's service, and it counts as service for the qualifying period

That second figure is the one worth reading twice. Statutory notice periods count as service when you work out whether a dismissal falls inside the qualifying period, and they count whether or not you actually give the notice. A week does not sound like much until you are deciding something at five and a half months and discover you have already crossed the line.

The uncapped award is less alarming than it sounds

The removal of the cap has produced some fairly excitable coverage, and it is worth being dull about it. The government's own guidance is clear that the basis of calculation does not change: compensatory awards are still worked out from the claimant's actual and projected losses, evidenced by them, and the great majority of unfair dismissal awards already sit well below the current cap. Removing the ceiling matters at the top end. For a ten-person firm it mostly is not where the risk lives.

The risk lives in the cost and disruption of defending a claim you have no documents for. That has always been true. What changes in January is how many more of your people are in a position to bring one.

Two years builds a file by accident. Six months does not

Here is what actually happens in a small business. Someone is hired. They are fine, mostly. There is a conversation in month three about turning up on time, which goes well and nobody writes down because it went well. There is a probation review at six months that happens as a chat in the van on the way back from a job. Objectives get agreed verbally in March and are never mentioned again. Eighteen months later there is a problem, and by then a supervisor has emailed about it, there is a rota showing the pattern, someone has put a complaint in writing, and a file exists because two years is long enough for one to accumulate whether you meant it or not.

Six months is not long enough. At six months there is a signed contract, a right-to-work check and nothing else.

So the work is not a new policy. It is making the first six months produce something.

What the first six months should leave behind

A written note of the probation review, with the date, who was there and what was said. Not a form; a paragraph is fine, and a paragraph that says "we discussed timekeeping, agreed a specific improvement, review again in a month" is worth more than a tidy template with boxes ticked.

The objectives the person was actually given, in writing, sent to them. If nobody can produce what the job required, nobody can show it was not being done.

Any conversation about performance, written up the same day, however well it went. The well-it-went ones are the ones that get skipped, and they are the ones that establish the problem was raised early and fairly.

The dates. When probation started, when it was reviewed, when it was extended and why.

None of that is unusual, and larger employers do all of it as routine. The difference in a firm of eight is that the manager is also the owner, the review happened in the car, and nobody's job is to write it up afterwards.

Retrievable in eighteen months, not just recorded

A record you cannot find is a record you do not have. We wrote in August about what the longer tribunal time limit does to evidence — the short version is that a dispute can now reach you the better part of nine months after the event, by which time memories have reorganised themselves and the records are all you have.

The same test applies here, with a longer clock. A probation note written in February 2027 may need to be produced in late 2028. Which means it cannot live in a WhatsApp thread on a manager's personal phone, which is its own problem when that person leaves. It cannot live in the manager's sent items if the manager is the one who might leave. It needs to sit somewhere attached to the person it concerns, where someone other than the author can find it.

For most firms that is a folder per employee in SharePoint with sensible permissions, and that is genuinely enough. You do not need an HR system to do this, and anyone selling you one on the strength of the January change is selling ahead of your actual problem. If you already run Microsoft 365, the filing half costs an afternoon.

Month five does not announce itself

The reminder is the part worth automating, because it is the part that fails. Probation dates sit in a contract nobody reopens, and the month-five point arrives when everyone is busy with something else.

Whatever runs your onboarding already knows the start date. Making it raise a task at the right moment is a small piece of work and it is the same job we do for clients constantly: take a recurring process, map it, give every handoff an owner, and stop it depending on somebody remembering. When we did that across one client's operations it was not the exciting part of the engagement, and it was the part that stopped things falling between people.

01List everyone who started in the last six months, and note when their probation was actually reviewed
02Decide where a probation note lives, per person, before you need to write one
03Put the review date in whatever raises tasks for you, at month four, not month six
04Write up the next performance conversation the same day, even if it went well
05Take the working conversations about staff off personal phones

One more thing lands the same day: dismissal and re-engagement becomes automatically unfair in most cases. That is a separate subject and a solicitor's, not ours.

If the filing and the reminders are not where you want to spend an afternoon, we can set them up. The writing-things-down part is still yours.

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