Making an employee redundant

Redundancy selection - compulsory

If - despite your best efforts - you have to make compulsory redundancies, you will need to establish:

• A pool of employees, all or some of whom will eventually be made redundant. For example, these could be employees at a particular site and/or doing a particular type of work. A pool should be as wide as possible, but can consist of only one employee.
• Redundancy selection criteria.

The criteria must be objective, non-discriminatory and applied consistently.

Among the variety of criteria that can be used to select employees for redundancy are:

• Skills, qualifications and aptitude - these can help keep a balanced workforce.
• Standard of work performance - with this method, you need to provide supporting objective evidence, for example from the business' appraisal system. See our guide on how to use appraisals to manage performance.
• Adaptability - it may be important for your business that employees accept different types of work as needs change.
• Attendance/disciplinary record - you must apply this method consistently, and be sure your records are accurate and that you understand the reasons for absences. Do not include absences for maternity, paternity or adoption leave, or disability related absence .

To avoid the possibility of unlawfully discriminating against anyone, you should use more than one criterion.

Automatically unfair selection criteria

Using certain selection criteria will make any subsequent redundancy dismissal automatically unfair, including selection due to:

• trade union membership, non-membership or activity
• legal industrial action lasting up to 12 weeks, or longer
• certain employee representative reasons
• actions taken on specified health and safety grounds
• reasons associated with pregnancy, maternity, paternity, adoption and parental leave
• reasons relating to regulations on part-time workers or fixed-term

For a complete list, see the page on automatically unfair reasons for dismissal in our guide on dismissal.

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• What is redundancy?
• What are lay-offs?
• What is short-time working?
• Avoiding redundancies
• Redundancy selection - non-compulsory
• Redundancy selection - compulsory
• The redundancy consultation process
• Rights of redundant employees
• How to help redundant employees
• Potential problems following redundancy
• Here's how we planned ahead to avoid making redundancies

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