Non-reserved business legal services
Someone has to go and you have realised nothing is written down. Here is the process a tribunal measures you against, the policies that earn their place, and what it costs.
You have decided somebody has to go, or a grievance has landed, and it has just dawned on you that nothing is written down — no procedure, no policy, nothing on file. No law says you must have a staff handbook. But three things that normally live inside one are effectively compulsory, and the third is the one about to matter to you: a written statement of particulars for every employee and worker on or before day one, a written health and safety policy once you have five or more employees, and a disciplinary and grievance procedure that follows the Acas Code — because that Code is the standard a tribunal measures you against, not a best-practice suggestion.
One caveat, since you may be reading this mid-problem. A handbook written this week does not repair a process that started last week. What it does is make everything from here defensible, and make the next one straightforward. Most unfair dismissal findings are not about whether the employee did the thing; they are about how the employer handled it.
HR policies and a staff handbook start at £1,495 +VAT as a fixed fee, agreed in writing before anything starts, and ongoing HR cover is the Virtual HR Manager subscription at £499 +VAT a month, which includes that setup and runs on a 12-month agreement. Drafting policies is non-reserved work, so it does not need a solicitor: Buzz Legal Ltd is not a firm of solicitors and is not SRA regulated. Running a live disciplinary for you, attending hearings and defending a tribunal claim are not included, and a settlement agreement only validly waives statutory claims if the employee takes independent advice from a relevant adviser — so both of those go to RHF Solicitors (authorised and regulated by the SRA, no. 324115). Payroll, pensions and PAYE are Buzz Accounting's job, not ours.
This is general legal information for employers in England and Wales, not advice on your workforce.
Our free employment documents checker separates the documents you must have by law from the ones that are simply a good idea — useful before you decide what goes in the handbook.
Get this straight before you write a word of it, because it is the mistake that costs the most. A contract of employment binds and is hard to change without agreement. A handbook should be guidance you can update as the business grows and the law moves. Make the whole handbook contractual and you have locked yourself into a document you can only change with every employee's consent — so the enhanced sick pay you offered as a gesture in a good year becomes a benefit you cannot withdraw in a bad one.
In practice that takes two pieces of drafting. One statement at the front, making clear that the handbook is guidance rather than part of the contract, that you can amend it, and that this holds except where a section expressly says otherwise. Then, inside the handful of sections you do want to bind — confidentiality, conduct, health and safety obligations — a line flagging that section as contractual. Silence is what gets argued over: where it is ambiguous, an employee can say that a discretionary scheme was an entitlement all along, and the argument starts from a document you wrote.
Generosity is fine. Undocumented generosity is the problem. If you add an extra week of full-pay sick leave, or an enhanced redundancy scheme, say in writing whether it is a contractual right or a discretionary perk — before it becomes the former by accident and you are paying it indefinitely.
Before the handbook, get the legal baseline right. Under the Employment Rights Act 1996, every employee and every worker must be given a written statement of particulars on or before their first day: pay, hours, holiday, job title, place of work, notice, and more besides. Some of the detail can point to where it lives, including the handbook, but the day-one statement itself is the legal duty and the handbook does not replace it. Our guide to employment contracts covers what has to be in it. Treat it as the foundation everything else sits on — and if you have people who never got one, that is the first gap to close.
A short handbook everybody has beats a two-hundred-page one nobody opens, and it is far easier to keep accurate. For most small employers the working set is:
Anything past that has to earn its place. Ambiguity about sick pay and holiday causes more day-to-day friction than every other policy combined, so spend the time there rather than on a dress code.
This is where a handbook earns its fee. The staged process is: investigate first, put the allegation to the employee in writing, hold a meeting they can bring a companion to, decide, and offer an appeal to someone who was not part of the original decision. None of those steps is ceremony. Each one closes off a line of attack. Skip the investigation and you cannot show the decision was reasonable; deny the companion or the appeal and you have handed over a procedural flaw before anyone argues about the facts. Write the steps down once and follow them every time, including for the employee you are certain about.
The Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures is the benchmark, and it has teeth: a tribunal can adjust an award by up to 25% where a party unreasonably failed to follow it — up if the employer ignored it, down if the employee did. On the qualifying period, unfair dismissal claims generally need two years' continuous service today, and that threshold drops to six months on 1 January 2027 under the Employment Rights Act 2025. But discrimination and whistleblowing claims have no qualifying period at all, and neither do the automatically unfair reasons for dismissal. A harassment grievance on day three is a live claim. 'They have not been here long enough' has never been the protection employers think it is, and in 2027 it protects a good deal less.
The dismissal that stuck, and the one that did not — Two firms dismissed an employee for the same conduct. The first had a written procedure: they investigated, wrote to the employee, held a meeting she attended with a colleague, and offered an appeal. The second dismissed on the spot after a heated conversation. Both employees claimed. The first firm's process held and the claim went nowhere; the second faced an avoidable claim and a tribunal unimpressed by the absence of any procedure at all. Same facts, opposite outcomes, decided almost entirely by whether there was a written process and whether it was followed.
A handbook written for a room full of desks misses most of what your business now does. Remote and hybrid working needs its own answers: where people are expected to be and when, how availability and hours work, what you pay towards a home set-up, and how company data stays secure once it leaves the building. Add acceptable use for IT and email, a line on what staff may and may not say about the business publicly, and — if you monitor systems at all — say so. Monitoring engages employees' data protection rights under UK GDPR, so it has to be proportionate and disclosed in advance, never produced afterwards as a surprise.
A handbook quoting rules that have since changed is worse than no handbook, because it looks authoritative and is wrong, and that is precisely what the other side's adviser will hold up. Diarise a review at least annually and after any significant change — the unfair dismissal qualifying period moving from two years to six months on 1 January 2027 is the next obvious one.
Then close the other gap: have every employee acknowledge in writing that they have received and read it, keep the acknowledgement on file, and repeat it whenever someone joins or the handbook is updated. Store it where people can genuinely find it rather than a shared drive nobody opens, and apply it consistently, because a rule enforced against one person and ignored for another becomes evidence against you. The acknowledgement is what turns 'we have a policy' into 'the employee knew the policy'.
The policy nobody had seen — An employer tried to rely on a social media policy after an employee posted something damaging about a client. The policy existed, but it had been emailed round once, two years earlier, to a different set of staff; this employee joined afterwards and was never given it. Faced with 'nobody told me that was a rule', the employer's position collapsed. A signed acknowledgement taken on her first day would have made the very same policy stick.
Drafting and updating the handbook and its policies is non-reserved work. Two things are not. To validly waive statutory employment claims in a settlement agreement, the employee must receive independent legal advice from a relevant adviser, so an exit on those terms needs a solicitor involved by law rather than by preference. And conducting a tribunal claim is specialist contentious work. Drafting and negotiating the agreement on your side, and conducting a tribunal claim, both go to RHF Solicitors (authorised and regulated by the SRA, no. 324115), at rates agreed before that work starts. The employee's independent advice has to come from their own adviser, never from anyone acting for you. We do the documents and the process; they do the reserved and contentious end, and the two join up without you paying twice for the same reading-in.
If a problem is live, do three things today: write down what has happened so far with dates, stop and follow the staged process from this point even if the earlier part was messy, and get advice before you put anything else in writing to the employee. Then book a legal review — a free call that ends with a straight answer on whether this is a Buzz Legal job or one for RHF Solicitors. The handbook and core policies start at £1,495 +VAT, fixed against a written scope: the policies a small employer needs, disciplinary and grievance procedures that follow a defensible process, holiday, sickness and absence, a remote or hybrid policy where you need one, and a handover so it is not a document nobody opens. If you would rather have the cover standing rather than buy documents once, Virtual HR Manager is £499 +VAT a month with the setup included.
Employment contracts for employers · Hiring your first employee · Employment documents checker · Fixed-fee work and prices
This is general legal information, not advice on your situation. For advice tailored to your business, book a legal review. Buzz Legal provides non-reserved business legal support; reserved legal activities are carried out by RHF Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the SRA (no. 324115).
One short email when a new guide is published — employment documents, contracts and the rest of the legal housekeeping. No newsletter, no selling, and you can reply to it.
The handbook itself is not compulsory, but a good deal of its contents effectively is. Every employee and worker must receive a written statement of particulars on or before their first day under the Employment Rights Act 1996. Employers with five or more employees must have a written health and safety policy. And you need a disciplinary and grievance procedure in order to act fairly, because the Acas Code sets the standard a tribunal will measure you against. A handbook is simply the practical way of holding all of that together so it is consistent, findable and the same for everyone — which is most of what fair process means day to day.
Because it is what a dismissal is judged against. A fair, staged process — investigate, put the allegations in writing, hold a meeting, allow the employee to be accompanied, decide, and offer an appeal — following the Acas Code of Practice is what makes a dismissal defensible. A tribunal can adjust an award by up to 25% either way where a party unreasonably failed to follow the Code, so the process is not optional polish. Most unfair dismissal findings are not about whether the employee did the thing they were accused of; they are about how the employer handled it. The procedure is the cheapest insurance in the handbook.
Usually not in its entirety. Making the whole handbook contractual locks you into a document you can then only change with every employee's agreement, which becomes a genuine operational problem the first time you want to update a policy. The standard approach is to keep the handbook as non-contractual guidance you can amend, while stating clearly that a small number of specified parts do bind — obligations on confidentiality and conduct, for example. Say plainly which is which, in both the handbook and the contract. Where it is left ambiguous, an employee can argue that a discretionary policy, such as an enhanced redundancy scheme, was a contractual entitlement all along.
Yes. Unfair dismissal claims generally require two years' continuous service today, and that threshold drops to six months on 1 January 2027 under the Employment Rights Act 2025 — but discrimination and whistleblowing claims have no qualifying period at all, and neither do the automatically unfair dismissal reasons. A grievance about harassment on day three is a live risk, and how you handle it will be judged on whether you had a process and followed it. “They have not been here long enough to claim” is a dangerous assumption to run a business on, and it is also poor management: the businesses that handle short-service problems well are the ones with a process to follow.
Start with the ones that do work rather than the ones that fill pages. Disciplinary and grievance, because they set the process a tribunal measures you against. Health and safety, a legal requirement at five or more employees. Holiday, sickness and absence, including whether you pay above statutory sick pay, because ambiguity there causes more day-to-day friction than anything else. Equal opportunities and anti-harassment, which matter from day one. Data protection and IT acceptable use. And a remote or hybrid working policy if that is how you operate. Anything beyond that should earn its place: a hundred-page handbook nobody reads protects less than a short one everybody has.
Give it to them and keep proof. A policy nobody was told about is hard to rely on when you need it, so have every employee acknowledge in writing that they have received and read the handbook, keep that acknowledgement on file, and repeat it whenever the handbook is updated or someone joins. Store it somewhere people can genuinely find it rather than a shared drive nobody opens. And apply it consistently, because a policy enforced against one person and ignored for another becomes evidence against you rather than for you. The acknowledgement is what turns “we have a policy” into “the employee knew the policy”.
HR policies and a staff handbook start at £1,495 +VAT as a fixed fee, covering the core policies a small employer needs, disciplinary and grievance procedures that follow a fair and defensible process, holiday, sickness and absence policies, a remote or hybrid working policy where you need one, and a short handover explaining how to use it. Not included: running a live disciplinary or grievance for you, attending hearings, defending a tribunal claim and settlement agreements, which go to RHF Solicitors — and where a settlement agreement is used, the employee must take their own independent advice elsewhere — and payroll, pensions and PAYE, which Buzz Accounting handles. Ongoing HR support is the Virtual HR Manager subscription at £499 +VAT a month.
Clear scope · fixed fees available. Buzz Legal Ltd is not a firm of solicitors and is not regulated by the SRA.