The Government has published draft regulations to double the Acas Early Conciliation window from six weeks to twelve, with the new period applying to Early Conciliation started on or after 1 December 2025.
In outline terms, this means conciliators will have a longer period to contact the parties and explore settlement before a claim is issued.
Early Conciliation Window Extended
The draft Employment Tribunals (Early Conciliation: Exemptions and Rules of Procedure) (Amendment) Regulations 2025 have been published as SI 2025/1153. It states the Regulations come into force on 1 December 2025 and amend the Early Conciliation (EC) rules, increasing the EC period from 6 weeks to 12 weeks by altering the 2014 EC Regulations’ rules on how long a conciliator seeks settlement.
The familiar timing mechanics still apply: the limitation clock pauses from the date the prospective claimant first contacts Acas until the Early Conciliation certificate is issued, and where the normal limitation would otherwise expire during that period or within the month after, time is extended to one month after the certificate.
For now, the primary time limit for most employment tribunal claims remains three months. If and when the Employment Rights Bill’s proposal to extend most primary limits to six months is commenced, it will interact with the longer conciliation window to lengthen the overall exposure period.
How will the Extended Window Work?
The effect of the extended window on timelines is easiest to understand with examples.
Under the current three-month primary limit, an employee who experiences an event on 1 January and starts Early Conciliation in late March can run the full twelve-week conciliation, receive a certificate in mid-June, and still have the post-certificate month to issue. Even without the Bill’s changes, that already pushes a potential claim into mid-July. Once the six-month primary limit is brought into force, the window stretches further.
Take the same 1 January event, with Early Conciliation started in late June: the six-month limit that would otherwise have expired on 1 July is paused during the twelve weeks of conciliation and then extended by the post-certificate month, which means an ET1 could still arrive into October.
In practice, where Acas contact occurs late in the conciliation period and with tribunal administration lag, employers can experience first notice of a dispute nine to twelve months after the underlying event.
Impact on Employers
For employers, the headline implication is longer uncertainty. There is more time between the workplace incident and clarity on litigation risk, so budgets, reserves and management expectations should be recalibrated accordingly. Evidence risk increases with time, which places a premium on early, disciplined preservation of notes, emails, chat logs, rotas, performance data and any relevant CCTV or system access records at the point an incident arises.
Conciliator contact may still also come in late in the twelve-week period, so organisations should ensure there is a reliable, central intake route for Acas references that is monitored consistently and does not depend on a single individual.
Because the paused period and the post-certificate month need to be applied carefully to each case, limitation may become more challenging to analyse. A standard calculation approach and internal sign-off procedure reduces the risk of taking an incorrect point on time. Claims handling capacity may also need adjustment: a longer window can increase the proportion of in-time claims that would previously have been out of time, so panel firms and internal teams should be resourced to deal with a higher volume of late-arriving matters. Insurance notifications should be aligned to these realities, with Early Conciliation references treated as potential notifiable circumstances where policy wording requires early notice.
Operationally, the most effective response is to bring structure and speed to the very start of the dispute lifecycle. When an incident occurs, managers should escalate promptly, investigations should be opened quickly, and documentation should be recorded in a way that will read well months later in disclosure. When Acas first makes contact, the organisation should move within forty-eight hours to gather the facts, test the merits, check the state of the evidence, and decide whether to engage in settlement discussions or prepare to defend. Communications to Acas and to the claimant’s side should use consistent, approved wording that preserves legal positions and avoids unguarded commentary that could be unhelpful later. Policies on grievance, discipline and data retention should be reviewed to ensure timelines, hand-offs and record-keeping reflect the longer horizon.
DMS Perspective
As timelines extend, people manager capability becomes more valuable. Practical, scenario-based training on investigations, note-taking, reasonable adjustments and protected conversations delivers a high return because it improves the quality of contemporaneous material that will be scrutinised months later.
The real legal and cost concerns with a long-tail window environment is lateness: the longer it takes for an incident to reach HR with a clean set of contemporaneous documents, the higher the evidential risk and the settlement pressure.
Building a measurable key performance indicator for days from incident to internal notification, and linking it to management objectives, changes behaviour in the right direction. Finance and Legal should be integrated earlier in the cycle so that quarterly forecasts reflect likely settlement outflows and boards are not surprised by provisions near year-end.
Looking ahead to the Employment Rights Bill’s six-month primary limit, organisations should update risk models and board reporting now. The realistic exposure period in many cases will combine six months from the event, up to twelve weeks of paused time during conciliation, and a further month after the certificate. That profile should inform provisioning, insurer engagement, dispute resolution strategy and workforce communications.
Taken together, the longer Early Conciliation window and the prospect of extended primary limits do not change the fundamentals of workplace dispute best practices, but they raise the cost of delay and inconsistency. Employers that act early, document well and take a disciplined approach to limitation and communications should carry less risk over a longer timeline and will be better positioned to achieve sensible outcomes should claims materialise.
Need Assistance?
To discuss the impact of the extended conciliation window on your workplace dispute and legal risk management, contact us.
The full draft regulations can be viewed here
