Redundancy

Employers must consult with their employees in these circumstances. A redundancy consultation process must be meaningful and have the aims of trying to avoid redundancies; investigating any interest in voluntary redundancy; identifying the selection pool; setting selection criteria; and ensuring a fair process for redundancy selection where there are multiple employees to choose from. Part of this consultation process is also to identify alternative jobs that are suitable alternatives to redundancy.

Once the employees who are to be made redundant have been selected, there is currently a Statutory Discipline and Dismissal Procedure that must be followed to effect redundancy dismissals. Failure to follow the statutory procedure will lead to a finding of an automatically unfair dismissal at an Employment Tribunal and will normally result in any tribunal award being increased by between 10% and 50%.

Employers also need to consider whether the employees selected for redundancy are to work their contractual notice or alternatively to make a payment in lieu of notice or, where provided for contractually, place them on garden leave.

There are more stringent rules where there are 20 or more employees at risk of redundancy, in which case the consultation period must last at least 30 days; and where there are 100 or more employees at risk this increases to a 90-day consultation period.

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