Equality and Human Rights Commission

Giving references more generally

This guide only tells you about equality law. There are other laws which your employer must follow to make sure a reference does not break other laws, for example, laws relating to negligence or defamation. You can find out more about these from Acas, whose contact details are found within the Further sources of information section.

The most likely area where you will have contact with someone you used to work for is if you (or your prospective new employer) ask them to give you a reference.

An employer must not:

• refuse to give a reference at all; or
• give a bad reference

because of a protected characteristic or if refusing to give a reference would count as victimisation.

For example:

A worker’s former employer refuses to give them a reference because they supported someone else’s claim for sexual harassment. This would almost certainly be victimisation.

It does not matter how long ago you worked for the employer, as long as you can show that any unlawful discrimination arises out of and is closely connected to the previous employment relationship. 

If you are still working for the employer when you ask for a reference in order to change jobs, this is still part of your employment, and you must not be unlawfully discriminated against, just as in every other work situation.

In general, there is no legal requirement for an employer to provide you with a reference, provided their policy on providing references (or not providing them) is applied without unlawfully discriminating against anyone. However, if your employment contract says that references will be provided then they must be.

In sectors where workers are subject to special rules (such as finance) and cannot get a job without a reference, the courts have said that there is an implied term in the contract that employers will provide one.

If an employer does give references, they must not include comments about the person’s characteristic (or in the case of disability, comments about something connected with the person’s disability) that might be unlawfully discriminatory.

The same rules apply to telephone and other verbal references. 

If, regardless of someone’s protected characteristics, the reference would have been bad, then an employer is of course entitled to do this. 

However, if an employer has given someone an undeserved bad reference in circumstances which make this unlawful discrimination, they are entitled to ask the employer to change what they have said. If they do not do this, the worker may be able to bring an Employment Tribunal case for unlawful discrimination.

You may be able to get hold of a copy of your employer's reference even if the reference was supplied ‘in confidence’:

• Your new employer may give you a copy if you ask for one. Even if your previous employer has provided a reference 'in confidence', your new employer may decide that they should give it to you to comply with data protection rules. Usually, your new employer will contact your previous employer to ask whether they object to the reference being disclosed, but even if they do object, the new employer can still give the previous employer's reference to you if they believe your interest in seeing what has been written outweighs your previous employer's interest in having it treated confidentially.
• If you do not get a job, or you have a job offer withdrawn, and you believe that this is because your previous employer provided a discriminatory reference, you can ask to see a copy using the questions procedure. You can read more about what this means in Dismissal, redundancy, retirement and after you have left a job.