Making staff redundant: a guide to the redundancy process in the UK

Making redundancies can be a stressful time for both you and your staff. We've collaborated with Wilkes to produce this guide full of practical advice that makes the process clear, and helps you deal with redundancy dismissals as fairly as possible.

Before you make the decision to start a redundancy process in your business, it’s important to double-check that you’ve considered other potential alternatives first. For example, layoffs and short-time working may be a better solution for temporary work shortages. (We'll touch on a number of other alternatives below too.)

However, if none of the alternative options work for you, you probably need to consider redundancy.

You should have an existing redundancy policy. This will steer you through the logistics and time-frames involved in the process, because redundancy is a very process-driven exercise and it’s important to ensure that you take the essential steps at the right time, with the right people and using the most appropriate communications and choice of wording.

Meanwhile, this guide provides a step-by-step recipe, bringing together all the relevant materials, options, calculations and legal necessities, to help you make the process as smooth and fair as possible for both you and your employees.

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There's no prescribed process for making someone redundant where they have less than 2 years' service as one of your employees.

This means that if an employee hasn’t yet worked for you for at least 2 years, you don’t need to go through the full redundancy process. Instead, you'd likely serve the employee with notice under their normal contract terms.

You do, however, need to ensure that you're following a fair and compliant procedure for any dismissal. The best way to ensure you're doing this is to follow the steps outlined in your redundancy policy and/or according to the relevant employment contract terms.

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Check the contract terms

Make sure you check these, in each case, as some contracts will contain obligations on you relating to dismissal processes and your employee's rights and you will need to comply with them.

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Length of service does not preclude claims

Just remember that an employee can still challenge your decision to dismiss them for a number of reasons, including unfair dismissal and/or discrimination.

Less than 2 years' service does not preclude these types of claim.

If an employee (or more than one affected employee) has been working with you for at least 2 years, you’ve already ruled out other solutions, and you have valid reasons for making redundancies, then you’ll need to formally notify that employee (or employees) of the potential redundancy situation and that it is possible their job within your business may be affected.

This guide continues on the basis that you know you need to run a redundancy process and it's time to share that news with your staff.

If you’re making more than 20 employees redundant, you’ll also need to go through an additional process called 'collective consultation'.

This is where staff are given 1–2 weeks to elect representatives to consult with your management on their behalf.

These elected representatives can be a valuable help to you and to your affected staff, as you progress through the redundancy process. They are able to gauge sentiment, relay staff anxieties to you, help you to manage these and explain why there may be no way to avoid what is happening, etc.

If you need to invite staff to elect representatives because you fall into a 'collective consultation' situation, you can use our template invitation when prompted to do so later in this guide.

There's also a nomination notice that you'll need to make available to your staff at that stage, so they can put forward their nominations for the position(s).

Trade union representatives

If your staff have a trade union representative (take a look at our guide to trade unions for more information on this), you’ll need send to the trade union written information (in form HR1) about the redundancy situation, and be prepared to work with the trade union and its representative(s) before starting the collective consultation process.

When this situation arises...

Taking advice is invaluable where you believe you're going to need to let more than 20 employees go.

In reality, you're unlikely to be considering this staffing impact in isolation of wider business activities (e.g. sale of a business, restructuring activities, shutting a business unit down), on which you are probably already taking advice from legal and/or tax and financial experts.