Your Employer Is Probably Watching. The UK Is Deciding What the Rules Should Be.

There is a public consultation closing at the end of this month that very few people outside employment law have noticed, and it concerns something most office workers will experience within the next few years: being measured by software.

On 8 July 2026, the UK government opened a consultation on the regulation of workplace monitoring technologies. It closes at 11:59pm on 30 September 2026. Anyone can respond – the government explicitly invited views from all parts of society, not just employers and unions.

Whatever comes out of it is unlikely to stay confined to Britain. Regulatory approaches to workplace technology tend to travel, and the questions being asked here are the same ones every jurisdiction will eventually have to answer.

What is actually being regulated

The government’s working definition is deliberately broad: digital tools employers use to collect, track, analyse or make decisions based on information about workers and what they do.

In practice, that covers a wide spectrum. At one end sit things most employees already accept without much thought – badge access systems, attendance tracking, email and communications monitoring. At the other end are tools that do considerably more: location tracking, biometric access controls, keystroke logging, continuous video surveillance, and automated performance evaluation.

The consultation also explicitly reaches into algorithmic management and solely automated decision-making – that is, decisions about a worker made without meaningful human involvement.

That last category is the reason this consultation exists now rather than five years ago. The technology stopped merely recording what people do. It began analysing patterns, generating scores, and feeding those scores directly into decisions about the people being scored.

How common has this become?

More common, quite quickly.

Information Commissioner’s Office data from roughly three years ago indicated that around one in five UK organisations were monitoring employees’ digital activity. A 2025 survey of UK managers by the Chartered Management Institute put that figure at one in three.

Part of that jump is a straightforward consequence of remote and hybrid work. When the office stopped being a place you could see people in, some employers reached for software that would tell them what they could no longer observe. But the trajectory suggests something beyond a pandemic artefact – the tools have become cheaper, better, and easier to bolt onto systems companies already run.

The three options on the table

The consultation sets out three broad directions, and it is worth understanding how differently each would land.

Guidance. The lightest option: clearer government explanation of what responsible practice looks like, without new legal force. This helps employers who want to do the right thing and are genuinely unsure how the existing law applies. It does little about employers who aren’t asking the question.

A statutory code of practice. This would set out expectations around transparency, fairness and proportionality, and – critically – give employment tribunals a framework to apply when disputes arise. Commentary on the consultation has noted that under such a code, where an employer’s use of monitoring technology was a material element of a case the worker won, a tribunal could adjust the compensation awarded by up to 25 percent. That is the mechanism that turns a code from advice into something with teeth.

A duty to consult or negotiate. The most interventionist option: legislation requiring employers to consult workers before introducing certain monitoring technologies, with protective awards where they fail to do so. Legal commentators have flagged this as the option carrying the heaviest administrative burden, particularly for technologies introduced incrementally or updated frequently – which describes most software.

And there is a fourth possibility the consultation itself acknowledges: doing nothing. The government has stated that no intervention remains a legitimate outcome if the evidence doesn’t demonstrate a clear problem. This is a genuinely open process, not a formality dressed up as one.

What already applies, regardless of the outcome

This is the point most easily lost in coverage of a consultation. Nothing here changes the law today, and nothing here suspends the law that already exists.

Employers introducing or continuing to use monitoring technology in the UK remain subject to UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and to existing ICO guidance on monitoring at work. Those obligations already require a lawful basis for processing, transparency with the people being monitored, and proportionality between the monitoring and its purpose.

The consultation sits within a wider set of reforms under the Employment Rights Act 2025, which points in a consistent direction: a stronger role for worker representation in decisions that affect working life. Even if none of the three options is adopted in full, that direction of travel is unlikely to reverse.

Why this is worth your attention

If you manage people, the practical advice from employment lawyers commenting on the consultation has been consistent: review what you’re already doing now rather than waiting for the outcome. Employers who can show their monitoring is transparent, proportionate and accompanied by genuine employee engagement will be in a comfortable position under any of the three options. Those who can’t will find the review harder in two years than it would be this month.

If you are an employee, the more useful question is a simple one most people have never asked: what is currently being collected about you at work, what is it used for, and does anything automated feed into decisions about your performance? You are generally entitled to know. Very few people ask.

And if you have a view on where the line should sit – between legitimate oversight and surveillance, between efficiency and autonomy – the consultation is open to the public until the end of this month. That window closes on 30 September.

The debate about AI at work has mostly been conducted in the language of jobs: which ones survive, which ones don’t. This consultation is about a quieter question that arrives sooner. Not whether software takes your job, but how much of your working day it gets to watch, score, and report on – and whether you get a say in that.

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