| Acas

Your employees have the right to request an information and consultation agreement.

Eligibility

By law, employees can request the agreement as long as your workplace has at least 50 employees.

For this request to be valid:

for businesses with 750 or more employees – at least 2% of employees must have made the request
for businesses with fewer than 750 employees – at least 15 people have made the request

Individual requests from employees

Individual requests from employees are counted together towards the total, if they're all within a 6-month period.

Individual requests made before 6 April 2020

The eligibility requirements changed on 6 April 2020 so it's easier for employees to make a request. If an employee made an individual request before that date, it's still counted towards the total as long as:

1 or more of the individual requests was made on or after 6 April 2020
all individual requests were made within a 6-month period

Example

A company has 750 employees. Before 6 April 2020, 4% of the company's employees had made individual requests for an information and consultation agreement.

Before 6 April this number would not have been enough for the requests to be valid. This is because the law required 10% of the company's employees to have made requests.

Since 6 April this number is enough for the requests to be valid, as long as at least 1 request is made from 6 April onwards.

How employees can make the request

They can make the request in writing to you or the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC).

If they make the request to you

The employee or employees must include:

the date they're making the request
their name and the names of any other employees included in the request
that they want to 'negotiate an information and consultation agreement'

If they make the request to the Central Arbitration Committee

The CAC will tell you about the request.

The CAC will keep the names of the employees making the request anonymous, if the employees asked for this.