As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly create an absence policy for your UK staff.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your current staff handbook, contracts, sickness procedure, family leave guidance and any occupational health process, then remove unnecessary personal data.
   2. Gather the business decisions the policy must reflect, including who staff contact, reporting hours, evidence requirements, sick pay arrangements, return-to-work practice, escalation routes and the policy owner.
   3. Paste those documents and decisions into a chatbot with the copyable prompt, asking it to mark missing information as a placeholder rather than filling gaps.
   4. Open the relevant current GOV.UK and Acas guidance and compare every legal proposition, entitlement, deadline and evidence rule in the draft against those sources.
   5. Ask a qualified HR adviser or employment solicitor to check the draft for discrimination, disability, pregnancy, confidentiality, contractual and collective-consultation risks.
   6. Ask managers and staff representatives, where applicable, to test the reporting and escalation steps against realistic absence scenarios, then correct unclear routes.
   7. Approve the policy owner, version date, review date and employee communication plan, publish the reviewed policy through your normal staff channel, and retain the approved version.

   Prompt

   Create a draft absence policy for [organisation] in the UK. It applies to [employees, workers or other staff] working under [working patterns and locations]. Use the information below and invent nothing: [paste existing contracts, handbook rules, reporting arrangements, sick pay arrangements, occupational health process, and absence records or themes without unnecessary personal data].
   
   The policy must cover reporting an absence, who must be contacted and by when, evidence and fit notes, short-term and long-term sickness absence, return-to-work discussions, planned medical appointments, emergency time off for dependants, disability-related absence and reasonable adjustments, pregnancy-related absence, annual leave during sickness, unauthorised absence, repeated absence, confidentiality, records, review meetings, appeals and who makes decisions. Separate legal or policy requirements from optional management choices.
   
   Write in plain British English with headings, a version date of 13 August 2026, and placeholders where I have not supplied a business decision. Do not invent statutory rights, deadlines, pay rules or case law. Check current GOV.UK and Acas guidance where available, cite the source beside each legal proposition, and flag anything that needs checking with an employment solicitor or qualified HR adviser. Identify wording that could create discrimination, disability, pregnancy, confidentiality or contractual risks. End with a short implementation checklist for managers and a list of decisions I must make before publishing. This is a draft for human review, not final legal advice.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.