What a menopause policy has to do, and what most of them miss
A menopause policy is not required by law. It is, in practice, the first thing an employee looks for, the first thing a tribunal asks to see, and the first thing an action plan is judged against.
The problem with policies is not that employers cannot find a template. It is that a downloaded template describes a generic organisation, so it commits you to nothing your managers can actually act on. This page sets out what a policy has to do, and what makes the difference between one that gets used and one that sits on an intranet.
What the policy is actually for
A policy has one job: to make it safe and obvious to raise something. Everything else follows from that. If a woman reading it cannot work out who to speak to, what she can ask for, and what happens to what she says, the policy has failed regardless of how well written it is.
That is also why the policy cannot be the whole answer. A policy states intent. An action plan states what you are doing and by when, and the evidence behind it. The two are different documents and are judged differently.
The eight sections a policy needs
| Section | What it has to answer |
|---|---|
| Purpose and scope | Who this covers, including agency and contract staff, and that it applies to perimenopause as well as menopause. |
| What we mean | Plain definitions, written for someone who has not been told this is what is happening to them. |
| What you can ask for | The actual adjustments this organisation will consider, named. Not "reasonable adjustments will be considered". |
| How to raise it | Named route, plus at least one alternative to the line manager. This is the section people read first. |
| What support exists | Everything you already fund, with how to reach each one. Most employees do not know what is available. |
| Manager responsibilities | What a manager must do, and what they must not do. Specific enough to be enforceable. |
| Records and confidentiality | Who sees what, what is written down, and what is not recorded. |
| Review | When it gets looked at again, and what would trigger a change. |
Three of those sections cannot be filled in by a template writer: the adjustments you will actually consider, the support you already fund, and the route for raising something. They are the sections that make the policy yours, and they are the ones generic templates leave vague.
Why a downloaded template usually fails
- It promises adjustments the organisation has not agreed to, so a manager reading it says no and the policy is immediately worth less than the paper it is on.
- It routes everything through the line manager, which is exactly the conversation people are avoiding.
- It lists no support, because the template author does not know what you fund. The employee concludes there is none.
- It is written in the language of an HR audience rather than the person who needs it at 3am.
- It is never reviewed, because nothing in it is measured, so nothing ever triggers a change.
The fix for the first four is the same: fill the policy from decisions your organisation has actually made. The fix for the fifth is to connect it to something that produces numbers.
How the policy connects to the action plan
Publishing a menopause action plan is voluntary from 6 April 2026 and, subject to legislation, expected to become mandatory from spring 2027 for employers with 250 or more employees. The government guidance runs as six steps, and the first is to understand the issues in your own organisation using workforce data, before choosing what to do about them.
That ordering matters for the policy too. If you write the policy first and the evidence second, the policy is a guess. If you find out what your own people are asking for first, the policy writes itself: the adjustments section becomes the list they asked for, and the support section becomes the list they told you they could not find.
Source: Creating an action plan: guidance for employers, GOV.UK, updated 13 May 2026
Where the draft comes from here
Summ Base drafts a policy from your own setup: the adjustments you have said you will consider, the support you have listed, and the route you have chosen for raising something. Square brackets mark the decisions that are yours rather than ours, and your adviser finishes it. Nothing in it is generated by a language model, so every line traces back to something you entered or something the guidance says.
It is a draft for a person to finish, not legal advice, and it should be read by someone qualified before you publish it.