The Hours the Kitchen Cannot Promise
The Employment Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent in December and its provisions are landing in stages. One of the significant ones arrives in 2027: employers will be required to offer a guaranteed hours contract to any worker whose actual working pattern consistently meets a set threshold over a reference period.
The government is consulting on exactly what that threshold looks like. The deadline is 25 August.
What the proposal actually says
The Act does not ban zero-hours contracts. The proposal is more targeted: workers who already work consistent hours in practice must be offered a contract that reflects that reality. If someone works twenty hours a week over a reference period, their employer must offer a guaranteed contract at something close to that level.
The aim is to address what the government calls one-sided flexibility. The flexibility that suited the employer but not the worker. The arrangement that kept someone available on call without the commitment of steady income. The legislation is trying to say: if the pattern is already there, formalise it.
That is a reasonable principle. The implementation in hospitality is complicated.
How a kitchen actually works
A kitchen in Brighton in August runs differently from the same kitchen in November. A community pub on Friday runs differently from the same pub on a Tuesday afternoon. A hotel dining room in school holidays staffs to a level that December never needs.
Zero-hours flexibility allows a kitchen to match people to trade that shifts by the day, the season, and the weather. The worker who picks up August Saturdays at a seafront venue may do twelve hours one week and four the next. Neither figure reflects what a guaranteed contract should look like, because neither figure reflects the year's actual pattern.
We run kitchens across Sussex: the Castle Inn, Tollgate, the Bull, the Berwick. Each of them has workers whose schedules vary with seasons, with private events, with whether a booking sheet came in or did not. Committing a guaranteed contract based on the reference period around a summer peak would create a staffing cost structure that autumn cannot support.
The workers who need certainty
None of this is an argument against the principle. There are people working in hospitality on zero-hours arrangements who want and need reliable income. They would take a guaranteed contract if offered one. The employer's reason for not offering it is not always flexibility that works for both: sometimes it is simply a preference for keeping cost off the payroll until the shift actually happens.
The legislation is trying to protect that second group. The problem is that writing law around the second group without carving out the first creates obligations that arrive on every employer regardless of why their patterns look the way they do.
The consultation is trying to settle the threshold that distinguishes a genuine flexible arrangement from one that has crystallised into regular work without regular terms. Where that line lands matters enormously for how kitchens plan their rotas from 2027.
What the consultation period is for
UKHospitality will submit to the consultation. Individual operators can too. The case worth making is specific: thresholds should reflect genuine full-year patterns, not peaks, and the reference period should be long enough to capture the seasonal reality of a hospitality business rather than a snapshot taken in the middle of summer.
The deadline is 25 August. That is before the August bank holiday, before September's thinning trade, and well before the winter cost pressures that will make the 2027 staffing structure feel very close indeed.
The rota tonight
The guaranteed hours question sits in 2027. The rota tonight was set before this week's booking sheet arrived. That is the same position every kitchen in the country operates from: committed cost, uncertain trade.
Around 4pm, when the evening's shape becomes clear, venues release on Halfseat the tables they expect to lose. Food at half price. Drinks at full price. A real cut of the booking fee going directly to the venue. The staffing cost is already committed. The question is whether the empty seat earns something before service ends.
The consultation is August 25. The empty chair is tonight.