The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and KPMG have found that a quarter of UK businesses intend to make employees redundant in the next year. Therefore many businesses are looking for information about the laws behind redundancy.

Since the last recession in the UK, redundancy laws have changed considerably, and those that don’t follow them risk expensive unfair dismissal and discrimination claims.

There are three general steps to dismissal of an employee:

1) Written notice, inviting them to a discussion meeting and giving them the grounds of their dismissal

2) The meeting

3) The Appeal

What Exactly Should Happen?

When a redundancy is proposed, a few lengthy consultation must take place, and there must be documentation in order to avoid a negative outcome at the Employment Tribunals. These meetings should look at the possibility of alternative employment for the dismissed, which could be vital if you want to avoid unfair dismissal cases.

Employees have the right to be accompanied by another employee or trade union official to the meetings. These people can take an active role, but don’t have the right to answer questions for the employee.

An employer must also be able to show they acted reasonably in all the circumstances. This means that you must be fair, objective and consistent. A paper trail to confirm this is usually extremely useful if needed in court.

After a specific employee has been objectively chosen from all the employees in the company, the employer must then make the difficult decision of how much information to disclose to the employee explaining the reasons for their dismissal.

One way you could try is to enclose details of the individuals own scores with the letter you must send them informing them of their possible dismissal, and also enclose a schedule of the other pool employee’s total scores on an anonymous basis in this letter.
 
This suggested approach is very cautious, but should provide substantial protection and lets any scoring mistakes be picked up during the consultations rather than in a courtroom!

Changes in the Pipeline…

It also looks like the legal side of redundancy is set to change in April of this year. It is likely that the dispute resolutions regulations will be scrapped and replaced by a new Acas Code of Practice.

The draft of this Code applies grievance and disciplinary procedures only, and redundancy and fixed term contracts are stated as being beyond its scope.

However, the extent to which the current redundancy principles are applied by Employment Tribunals is not yet fixed, but very likely to remain significant.

What Do You Think?

Do you have any advice on how to deal with redundancy? How would you inform your employees of the reasons for their dismissal? What do you think will be included in the new laws introduced in April? Let us know. Comment here.

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