Employment Law Redundancy Rights

What are your rights in a redundancy situation and what sort of procedure should your employer follow?

A redundancy situation can arise where, for example:

What does it mean to be at risk of redundancy?

Your employer should begin the selection process by identifying the group of employees at risk of redundancy, known as the “redundancy selection pool”. Your employer will then need to apply suitable selection criteria to decide which of the employees in the pool will be retained and which will be provisionally selected for redundancy.

Redundancy selection criteria that discriminate on the grounds of sex, race, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity or religion or belief, or on grounds of fixed-term or part-time status should not be used.

Should I be consulted with?

If you have been provisionally selected for redundancy, your employer should consult properly with you before reaching a final decision on whether it needs to make you redundant. This will usually mean your employer will hold meetings with you to discuss the situation in more detail.

At the end of the consultation period, your employer will confirm whether it is making you redundant, or whether an alternative to redundancy has been found. If you are dismissed for redundancy, you will usually have the right to appeal that decision.

If your employer fails to adequately consult with you or fails to offer you the right to appeal the decision to dismiss you for redundancy, you may have a claim for unfair dismissal, depending on the circumstances.

If your employer is considering making 20 or more employees redundant within a 90-day period, it will also have a duty to undertake “collective consultation” with representatives of affected employees, rather than just meeting with you and each other affected employee on an individual basis. The representatives will be either elected employee representatives or trade union representatives. If the collective consultation requirements apply, your employer will also need to begin the consultation process at least 30 days before any dismissals take effect (or 45 days if the employer is contemplating dismissing 100 or more employees) and notify the Secretary of State that it is contemplating making large-scale redundancies.

If your employer does not comply with the collective redundancy requirements, the employee representatives can apply to the employment tribunal which can order your employer to pay compensation of up to 90 days’ pay to each employee affected.

Do I have a right to an alternative job with my employer?

During the consultation period and at any time before your dismissal takes effect, your employer is obliged to consider you for any suitable alternative vacancies that become available in the business or in any associated companies. Any employee on maternity leave or shared parental leave has the right to be offered any suitable alternative employment first. Otherwise, if an employer has more than one other potentially redundant employee interested in an alternative role, it can undertake a competitive interview process to decide who to offer the role to. You can accept an alternative role on a four-week trial basis to decide whether it is suitable for you.

What will I be paid if I am made redundant?

If you are made redundant, you may be entitled to certain payments, depending on how long you have been employed and the terms of your employment contract:

I don’t think the redundancy is fair, what are my rights and options?

If there is a genuine redundancy situation and your employer follows a fair procedure in selecting you for redundancy, it may be able to fairly dismiss you for that reason, despite the adverse implications for you. However, if you believe that this is not a genuine redundancy situation, or your employer has not followed a fair procedure in selecting you for redundancy, or that the decision to select you for redundancy was one which no reasonable employer should have made, then you may have a claim for unfair dismissal.

There are also circumstances in which a redundancy dismissal will be classed as automatically unfair, regardless of how long you have been employed (for example, if your employer selects you for redundancy because you have made a flexible working request, or because you are pregnant or are a trade union member).