Redundancy

Redundancy is when an employee is dismissed because they are no longer needed by the business. The main reasons for redundancy fall within the following reasons:

• Complete cessation of your business.
• The closure of the place of work.
• A diminishing need to do the type of job the employee is employed to do.

A redundancy may count as unfair dismissal if unreasonable criteria have been used to select the individual being made redundant. For the redundancy to be fair, the employer must have created a justifiable set of criteria which are used to select the employee or employees to be made redundant (such as length of service, skills, qualifications, attitude at work, timekeeping, disciplinary proceedings), and the business must apply these criteria fairly to all the employees being considered for redundancy.

Your business must also show that the correct ‘pool of employees’ has been selected from for redundancy and that you have consulted properly with the employees concerned and carefully considered their responses and suggestions as well as whether any alternative employment that can be offered to redundant employees.

If a business is making large scale redundancies, being more than 20 redundancies within a 3-month period at one workplace (establishment), then the business is obligated to consult collectively with their employees for a period of at least 30 days.  If an employer is needing to make more than 99 people redundancy, then the period of collective consultation increases to at least 45 days.

For more information on other HR Policy support from ActifHR, click on another employment topic from the list on the left of this page.