Is your union’s join form ready for the Employment Rights Act 2025?

Posted 09 February 2026

Part of the Employment Rights Act 2025 will come into force on 18 February 2026, strengthening trade unions’ ability to organise, gain recognition, and represent workers in the workplace. In this post we’ll look at how the provisions impact online joining for unions.

Automatic Political Fund opt-in

The Trade Union Act 2016 legally required unions to get explicit opt-in from new members for political fund contributions. For most unions this has meant asking applicants if they would like to contribute, even if their fund wasn’t affiliated with a particular political party:

a join form question asking if the applicant wants to contribute to the union's political fund

From 18 February 2026 unions will no longer need this explicit opt-in, and can (again) automatically opt new members into a union’s political fund. This means any opt-in questions can be removed from your union’s join form, and rate calculations updated to automatically include political fund contributions.

Coming soon: e-balloting

The new act will also allow unions to use electronic balloting for statutory ballots. The exact timing for these changes is currently uncertain (the Government is working on secondary legislation to tighten up the law around unfair practices in relation to the ballots), but this change creates a huge opportunity for unions in terms of cost, convenience and participation over current paper balloting requirements. Because of this upcoming change, having a reliable contact email address for members is more important than ever.

Due to concerns about unscrupulous employers interfering or tampering with electronic ballots sent to workplace email addresses of members, we currently recommend unions try and capture personal email addresses from new members where possible. Personal email addresses are also better because:

they are generally longer lived, staying with members through any changes in employer
are more likely to be accessible on a member’s phone, giving you additional means to drive turnout outside of work hours, potentially leading to higher engagement

Our recommendation is that unions a) update their join forms to encourage applicants to provide a personal email address where possible and b) encourage existing members to update their details with a personal email address:

a join form question asking the applicant to provide a personal email address

Do the hard work to make it easy

We’re working on a new feature for the Join Together platform that will automatically recognise common workplace email address domains during applications and ask for an additional personal address when applicable. Every little helps.