What should you, as an employer, consider when making redundancies?

In this video Deborah Warren explains what you need to consider before making staff redundant so that you don't find yourself being taken to tribunal for unfair dismissal.

If you have any questions then call Deborah on 0113 336 3328 or email enquiries@clarionsolicitors.com

At Clarion we recognise that clients have different needs and requirements. Our experienced and talented lawyers provide an excellent range of business and private client services. We listen and understand our clients’ real issues and objectives in order to provide effective, bespoke legal advice.

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Transcript:

In today's climate we're helping a lot of our clients to save costs where possible.

And through that we are helping them to restructure the business sometimes and also possibly make redundancies.

There are a number of key elements that an employer would need to address if they were making redundancies.

The first is to make sure they have a fair redundancy reason and that's making sure you've got a genuine redundancy
situation.

After that they've got to follow a fair redundancy process which would involve making sure you inform and consult the affected employees and having a selection criteria that are fair and objective and scoring employees fairly and also considering whether you've got any alternative vacancies within the group.

So to have a look at in a bit more detail about each of those.

The first step is to make sure that you are dismissing for redundancy and for employment law purposes you must have a genuine redundancy reason.

That is one of three circumstances.

The first is that you have a workplace closure.

So you might have a number of different sites and you decide to close one of them.

The second might be that you're closing the business entirely so a business closure and the third which perhaps leads to the most dispute is that you have a reduced requirement for employees to carry out work of a particular kind.

So once you have established that fair reason you can then think about what sort of process you're going to follow.

If you don't establish that it is actually a genuine redundancy reason then the process you would follow may be quite different because actually the reason for dismissal wouldn't be redundancy.

So to have a look at the process in a bit more detail.

The first step would be to inform and consult with employees.

So that would mean you'd have to notify the employees in writing of the proposals and then you need to have a number of meetings with them over a number of weeks individually to discuss your proposals and hear what they have to say.

The second key element in the process that an employer would need to address is having fair and objective selection criteria and scoring the employees fairly.

The best way to have selection criteria the objective is to make sure that you can assess employees using objective methods such as disciplinary records or absence records and that way if you're challenged you can prove the reasons why you gave particular employees particular scores.

In terms of the scoring ideally you would have two managers at least scoring each of the employees so that you can
again prove that the scoring is fair it's done consistently.

The way to increase consistency of course is to give those managers guidelines as to how they should allocate marks so when they should give an employee a score of five or when they should give an employee a score of two.

The third key element in a redundancy process is making sure that you are considering whether there are any alternative vacancies within the group.

If there are any alternative roles within the business it might be that you can completely avoid the redundancy at
all.

If there are alternative vacancies and they are suitable for the employee and you offer it to an employee and they unreasonably reject that alternative vacancy you can actually get out of paying such a redundancy payment and actually save more costs than you thought.

Ultimately it's really important to have a fair dismissal that you have a fair reason so that genuine redundancy
situation and that you follow a fair process which for the most part will incorporate informing, consulting, selection and scoring and then considering alternative vacancies.

That way you put yourself in the best position to defend any employment tribunal claims.

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