UK consultation on workplace monitoring closes 30 September, and homeworkers are the ones it reaches
The Department for Business and Trade’s consultation Make Work Pay: workplace monitoring technologies closes at 11:59pm on 30 September 2026. Run by the Employment Rights Directorate, it seeks views on proposals to support the fair, transparent and responsible use of monitoring technologies at work, and it is explicitly open to anyone with a view rather than only to employers and unions.
The technologies in scope are the ones that arrived with home working and stayed: keystroke logging, screen capture, activity scoring, location tracking, and algorithmic management systems that allocate work or assess performance without a person in the loop.
Why this matters
If you work from home for a UK employer, you are the person this consultation is about. Monitoring that would be obvious in an office — someone seeing you at your desk — becomes software on your own laptop, in your own house, often running without a clear statement of what it records or how long it is kept. You are also the person least able to see it happening, and least likely to have been consulted before it was installed.
A consultation is the point at which that is cheap to influence. Responding takes an evening and needs no legal training: what you have been asked to install, what you were told about it, what you were not told, and what you think a reasonable rule would look like. Individual responses from people actually being monitored carry weight in this process precisely because most submissions come from organisations rather than from the monitored.
Context
This sits within the Make Work Pay programme, alongside the Employment Rights Act changes that have been arriving through 2026. It is a live consultation rather than settled law, so nothing here changes your position today — but the rules that follow it will apply to the software already running on a great many home-office machines.
What to watch
The closing date is 30 September 2026, with the consultation document and response form on the GOV.UK consultation page. Government responses to Make Work Pay consultations have generally been published several months after closing, so expect the outcome rather than the rules before the end of the year.