Can I record a disciplinary meeting, and can they?

7th October 2026

Two different questions are hiding inside this one, and they have different answers. Whether you may record is about your duties as an employer. Whether your employee may record is about what you are willing to allow and what happens if they do it without asking. Most managers arrive at the second question in a panic, after the event, when the useful moment has already passed.

Neither of you has a right to record

Start with what the law gives your employee at a disciplinary hearing. Section 10 of the Employment Relations Act 1999 gives them the right to bring one companion and spells out what that companion may do: put their case, sum it up, respond on their behalf, and confer with them during the hearing. It says nothing about recording. There is no statutory right for an employee to record a disciplinary meeting and no statutory right for you to record one either.

That is why the question has no legal yes or no. It is a question about your procedure, and whoever thinks about it first sets the terms.

Do not expect Acas to settle it for you. The Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures, which a tribunal must take into account where it is relevant, does not mention recording at all. Nor does the draft replacement Code that Acas consulted on until 23rd September 2026. The only place Acas touches it is a short passage about investigation meetings, which says an organisation “can record the meeting if its policy allows it and the worker agrees”, that “any decision to record should be agreed by all parties”, and that “a covert recording of an investigation meeting might be viewed as a misconduct matter or as a breach of trust and confidence” (Acas, holding investigation meetings).

Read that carefully, because it contains the answer for you as well. Recording is allowed if your policy allows it. If your policy says nothing, you are improvising in a meeting that may end in a dismissal.

Decide before the meeting and say so in the invitation

This is the whole of the practical advice. Pick your position now, while nothing is at stake, then state it in the letter inviting them to the hearing.

Either nobody records and a named person takes notes, or you both agree to a recording and you both get a copy. Pick one, write it in the invitation, and say what happens to the notes or the file afterwards. Our disciplinary hearing invitation letter template is the place to put it.

The default most small employers should choose is no recording, good notes, and a copy of the notes given to the employee to check and comment on. That is already what Acas expects of the grievance side, where it says to give the employee copies of the meeting record and notes taken and to ask them to confirm the notes are accurate. Applying the same habit on the disciplinary side costs you nothing and removes most of the arguments that recordings are supposed to settle.

If you record, you have taken on data protection duties

A recording of your employee is their personal data, and making it is monitoring. The ICO’s guidance on monitoring workers says you “must identify a lawful basis” and “must make sure workers are aware of how and what personal information you are collecting during any monitoring”.

If you are thinking of recording without telling them, stop. The ICO’s position is that covert monitoring “should only be authorised by senior management”, that it is “unlikely that you will be able to justify covert monitoring in most usual circumstances”, and that you “must carry out a DPIA” first. A disciplinary hearing you have already invited them to is not an exceptional circumstance.

There is also a practical consequence that catches employers out. If you hold a recording or notes, your employee can ask for them, and you must respond “without delay and within one month”, extendable by up to two months where the request is complex. The ICO is explicit that you “cannot simply refuse to comply because the worker is undergoing a grievance or tribunal process”, and that having already disclosed the material in tribunal proceedings “does not mean you can refuse to comply with a SAR” (ICO, subject access requests for employers). Record only what you are content to hand over.

When you have to allow it anyway

There is one situation where refusing is risky. If your employee is disabled and recording the meeting is what lets them take part properly, allowing it may be a reasonable adjustment. Section 20 of the Equality Act 2010 requires you to take such steps as it is reasonable to have to take to avoid a substantial disadvantage, including providing an auxiliary aid. Someone who cannot reliably retain what was said in a long and stressful meeting has an obvious case for one.

You do not have to agree to a recording on the spot. You do have to take the request seriously, ask what the difficulty actually is, and consider alternatives that solve it, such as a longer meeting with breaks, a written summary the same day, or a note taker whose notes they approve. If none of those works and a recording does, allow it. Refusing flatly, with no thought, is the version that turns one grievance into a discrimination claim.

They recorded it without asking. Now what?

First, separate the recording from the misconduct you were dealing with. They are two issues and running them together is how employers lose cases they were winning.

Second, be honest about whether your policy told them not to. If it did, covert recording is a matter you can address, and Acas supports treating it as a potential misconduct or trust issue. If your policy says nothing, you are on much weaker ground treating it as gross misconduct, and you would be inventing a rule after the fact in the middle of a process where fairness is the whole test.

Third, accept that the recording probably exists and probably matters. Your employee recording a meeting they were in, for their own use, sits outside most of the data protection rules you have to follow, because the UK GDPR “does not apply to” a list of things that includes “processing carried out by individuals purely for personal/household activities” (ICO, who does the UK GDPR apply to). That changes if they start circulating it, but it means you cannot make the recording go away by objecting to it.

The right response is to behave in every disciplinary meeting as though it is being recorded. Not defensively, just properly. Say what you are relying on, let them answer it, do not decide anything before they have spoken, and do not say anything in the room you would not write down.

Your notes now have to last twice as long

One change makes all of this more consequential than it was a year ago. The law on tribunal time limits changed on 1st October 2026, and for most claims about a problem on or after that date an employee now has six months minus one day rather than three. Add the early conciliation and correspondence that usually follow, and the notes of this week’s hearing may need to be intelligible to a stranger well into next spring.

From 1st January 2027 the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal drops from two years to six months, and the cap on the compensatory award is removed (Acas, Employment Rights Act 2025). Far more of your staff will be able to challenge a dismissal, and the test will be the one it has always been: whether you acted “reasonably or unreasonably”, judged in the circumstances including the size and administrative resources of your business. We have written more about that change in unfair dismissal at six months, and on what happens when an employee resigns in the middle of one.

A clear note of who said what, agreed with the employee at the time, does that job. An argument about whether somebody was allowed to press record does not.

Tarn.hr provides HR guidance based on UK employment law and Acas codes of practice. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as such. Employment law is complex and turns on the facts of each case. For any situation involving significant legal risk, potential tribunal claims, or matters of particular sensitivity, you should seek advice from a qualified employment solicitor. Tarn.hr is not responsible for any decisions made on the basis of its guidance.