HR policies with ChatGPT: draft, check against UK law, approve

What you’ll end up with

One HR policy, written in plain English, checked against the legal minimums from GOV.UK and Acas, and signed off by a named person with the authority to do it.

The AI does the drafting. It’s good at structure and at turning clunky handbook wording into something a normal person can read. It’s not reliable on what the law says, so you don’t ask it. The legal side comes from the source pages and the sign-off comes from a person. Three hands on one document: you collect, the AI drafts, a named person approves.

Before you start

Gather four things: your current handbook section on the topic, the relevant terms from your employment contracts, the Acas guidance or Code of Practice that applies, and the name of whoever approves it. “Someone senior” isn’t a name. If nobody knows who signs it off, the policy just sits in a folder, so settle it now.

Steps

1. Collect what you already say

Pull together everything your organisation currently says about the topic. The handbook is the obvious place, but look at contracts and past staff announcements too, and write down the things people do that aren’t written anywhere. If everyone assumes a rule exists, you need to know before you write anything.

Put it all in one document. Messy is fine. Contradictions are useful, because they show where the policy needs to make a decision.

Checkpoint: everything you currently say on this topic sits in one place, including the unwritten bits.

2. Get the legal checklist from GOV.UK and Acas, not the AI

This is the step people skip, and it matters most. Find the GOV.UK page or Acas guidance for your policy area and copy the requirements into a document of their own. That’s your checklist.

Why not ask the AI? Because it sounds the same whether it’s right or not. It can invent a rule, get a time limit wrong, or slide in something from another country’s law. You can’t tell from the tone.

Some examples of what the sources give you:

• Written statement (GOV.UK). Employers must give employees and workers a principal statement on the first day of employment and a wider written statement within 2 months. The wider statement must include information about pensions, collective agreements, any other right to non-compulsory training, and disciplinary and grievance procedures. Sick pay and procedures, other paid leave and notice periods must also be given on day one, in the statement or a separate document staff can reasonably access.
• Disciplinary and grievance (Acas). The Acas Code of Practice, published 11 March 2015, is the minimum an employer should follow, and the procedure followed is taken into account if a case reaches an employment tribunal. Acas says it will be updating the Code and has consulted on a draft, so check which version is current.
• Home and hybrid working (Acas). A policy should open with a statement of commitment, say who it was agreed with (for example a trade union or employee representatives), define its terms, say how and when it will be reviewed, and explain how requests are made and decided. Be careful not to directly or indirectly discriminate on eligibility.

Copy what applies to your policy, from the current page, not from this list.

Checkpoint: a separate checklist, copied from the current GOV.UK or Acas page, that you could hand to someone else.

3. Draft the structure

Now the AI earns its keep. Give it what you collected in step 1 and ask for an outline. Tell it to keep your rules and add nothing, because left alone it will helpfully invent a few.

Turn the wording below into a policy outline with clear headings for purpose, scope, definitions, procedure and review. Keep all the rules we currently follow, add nothing new, and keep the language simple.

[paste your existing wording here]

Read what comes back with the checklist beside you.

Checkpoint: the outline has a home for everything you currently do and for every point on your checklist. A missing heading is a gap you’ve found early.

4. Draft the wording in plain English

Work one section at a time. It’s much easier to spot a problem in a few paragraphs than in ten pages.

Rewrite this section in plain UK English for a general workforce. Keep every obligation and rule we currently have. Add nothing new. If anything is unclear or could mean two different things, mark it with [CHECK].

[paste the section here]

The [CHECK] instruction gives the AI a way to say “not sure” instead of guessing. Treat every [CHECK] as a question for a person, not something to settle by asking the AI again. Watch the vocabulary too: a term like “at-will employment” comes from US law and has no place in a UK policy.

Checkpoint: someone new to the organisation could read the section and know what to do, and every [CHECK] has been answered by a person.

5. Check the draft against the checklist

Comparison is a job AI does reasonably well, as long as you stop it adding anything of its own.

Compare the draft policy below with the checklist I've pasted from [Acas / GOV.UK]. List every point on the checklist that the draft does not cover. Do not add any legal content yourself; only flag what is missing.

Draft policy:
[paste your full draft]

Checklist:
[paste the requirements from Acas or GOV.UK]

Fill each gap using the wording from the source, not the AI’s version of it.

Then the numbers. Statutory rates change: GOV.UK says National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates change on 1 April every year, and it lists the current Statutory Sick Pay rate on its own page. Never let the AI supply a rate, threshold or time limit. If your policy mentions one, check it on the current GOV.UK page yourself, or point staff to the page instead of printing a figure that will go out of date.

Checkpoint: every missing point is filled from the source, and every rate, threshold and time limit has been checked on GOV.UK.

6. Approval, consultation and roll-out

Send the draft to the named approver with the checklist and the gap comparison, so they can see what it was checked against. They’re approving the policy, not the AI’s work.

If you have a trade union or employee representatives, involve them early, not when the thing is finished. For a hybrid working policy, Acas suggests the policy itself says who it was agreed with.

Once it’s approved, tell staff where to find it. And if the change affects anything in people’s written statements, GOV.UK says you must tell them within one month of making the change.

Checkpoint: a named approver, a record of any consultation, and a clear place where staff can find the final version.

Common mistakes

• Letting the AI invent a rule, rate or time limit. It does this fluently. If a figure or deadline appears that you didn’t copy from GOV.UK or Acas, treat it as unverified.
• Out-of-date rates. A number that was right once can be wrong now. Minimum wage rates move every 1 April.
• Terms from another country’s law. “At-will employment” is the classic. Anything that sounds American deserves a second look.
• Skipping consultation because the draft arrived fast. Speed is the point of using AI, but no reason to leave out the people the policy affects.

When to keep AI out of it

Keep it away from live cases about a named person. Don’t ask it how a policy applies to a specific employee, whether a disciplinary outcome is fair, or how to handle a particular grievance. Those need human judgement, knowledge of the individual and a proper process.

The AI is for writing the policy that covers everyone. Applying it to one person is a human job.