Glasgow pauses fire and rehire. The new contracts still start 1 January

On Friday 25 September, Glasgow City Council agreed to pause its plan to dismiss about 23,000 non-teaching staff and re-engage them on new contracts. The dismissal letters it was about to send will not go out. The pause followed online talks chaired by Jenny Gilruth, the Deputy First Minister, and the council, GMB, Unison and Unite return to the table next week.

The pause is on the dismissals. The new pay and grading structure is still dated 1 January 2027.

Why the council says it has to act

Equal pay. Colin Edgar, the council’s director of communication and governance, says the existing grading scheme “discriminates against people”, and that there are “only two ways” to end it: a collective agreement with the unions, or dismissing and re-engaging. In 2019 the council settled more than 15,000 historic equal pay claims at a cost of around £505m.

The two sides describe the same scheme differently, and both descriptions can be true at once.

Point at issue	The council’s account	Unison’s account
Who is worse off	Pay rises or stays the same for 90% of staff	Nearly 2,000 workers face a cut
Money on the table	£110m more offered towards assimilation and arrears	The proposals do not deliver fair pay
Protection for losers	Six months, raised to 12 months for staff in detriment	Still fighting for that group

The thing most people get wrong

A lot of readers believe the Employment Rights Act 2025 has already outlawed fire and rehire. It has not, yet.

Acas, the workplace advice service, says dismissal and rehire “will become an automatically unfair dismissal in most cases” in January 2027. Until then the route stays open. Employers are expected to follow the statutory Code of Practice on dismissal and re-engagement, and a tribunal can add up to 25% to an award where an employer has unreasonably failed to follow it.

When the change arrives, dismissing someone for refusing a change to pay, pension, working hours or shift patterns becomes automatically unfair. No minimum service is needed to claim it. An employer escapes only by showing the change was forced by financial difficulty it could not reasonably have avoided. For a public body that test is worded differently rather than more kindly: it turns on the financial sustainability of carrying out its statutory functions.

So a dismissal that takes effect on 31 December 2026 and one that takes effect a few weeks later are judged under different law. Nobody has said which day in January the change starts. The government’s own timeline lists fire and rehire under January 2027 with no date, while the unfair dismissal change beside it is dated 1 January 2027.

If you work for a council somewhere else

This is a Glasgow dispute about Glasgow grades. Scottish councils bargain through the Scottish Joint Council, so the scale in question is not the National Joint Council spine used in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and none of these figures carry across. Our page on the NJC pay award covers that separate settlement and the month it reaches a payslip.

Where these figures come from

• Plans to fire and rehire thousands of Glasgow City Council staff on hold — STV News
• Glasgow City Council to fire and rehire thousands of staff after pay talks break down — STV News
• Glasgow City Council to fire and rehire 23,000 workers — Personnel Today
• Employment Rights Act 2025 — Acas
• Employment Rights Act: how will the fire and rehire provisions apply in practice? — Lewis Silkin
• Code of practice on dismissal and re-engagement — GOV.UK
• Plan to Make Work Pay and Employment Rights Act: timeline update — GOV.UK

Every figure traces to a dated document — the line this section is named after. If one here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed publicly. Work out your own figures.