Employment Rights Bill: Motion to disagree with Lords Amendment 121

MPs voted 316 to 161 on 15 September 2025 to reject Lords amendment 121 to the Employment Rights Bill. The amendment, inserted by the House of Lords, would have permitted academy schools to deviate from the pay and conditions agreed through the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, a body the Bill reinstates after its abolition in 2010. The government's motion to disagree with the Lords passed, meaning academy schools will remain bound by whatever agreements the negotiating body reaches. The vote matters because it determines whether academy schools, which operate with greater independence from local authority control than maintained schools, can set their own terms and conditions for support staff, such as teaching assistants and administrative workers, outside the centralised negotiating framework. The government's position is that allowing academies to opt out would undermine the purpose of restoring the negotiating body. Had the Lords amendment stood, academy employers could have offered different pay and conditions independently of that body's agreed outcomes. The division followed strict party lines. All 307 Labour and Labour and Co-operative MPs who voted backed the government. The 161 votes against came from Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, the Democratic Unionist Party, and the Ulster Unionist Party. The Greens and a handful of independents voted with the government. No Labour MPs voted against. The result fits a broader pattern in the Bill's passage through ping-pong, the back-and-forth process between Commons and Lords, in which the government has consistently overturned Lords amendments that opposition peers inserted to soften or limit the Bill's provisions.