By Elizabeth Stevens and Stephen Chegwin
When an employer is in the position of having to select individuals for redundancy from a pool of employees, the criteria adopted and the manner in which those criteria are applied are crucial to both a fair redundancy procedure and, ultimately, achieving a fair dismissal.
A redundancy situation in which the employer chooses some employees to be made redundant over others who remain in post is more likely to result in bad feeling and lead to a higher risk of employment tribunal claims by unhappy employees than one where all employees are made redundant. It is therefore important for the employer to be able to defend the method of selection by showing that it has used appropriate criteria, applied in a fair and consistent way.
In this guide, learn about:
- The role of the redundancy matrix
- Checking for contractual redundancy criteria
- Choosing redundancy selection criteria
- Choosing the assessment period
- Defining the requirements of the future role
- Deciding on the weighting of criteria
- Consulting on the criteria
- Assessing performance
- Taking disciplinary records into account
- Measuring absence
- Using length of service as a criterion
- Using interviews or assessment exercises in the selection process
- Applying the criteria fairly
- Consulting employees over their scores
- Confirming the redundancies
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About the authors
Elizabeth Stevens
Liz Stevens has specialised in employment law since qualifying as a solicitor in 2000 and now works as a professional support lawyer in the employment team at Birketts. Her role includes keeping track of employment law developments, writing client bulletins and articles for publication, and producing regular seminars for clients on all aspects of employment law.
Stephen Chegwin
Partner, Eversheds Sutherland
Stephen Chegwin is a Partner at Eversheds Sutherland. Stephen specialises in industrial relations/labour and employment law, acting primarily for global and large-scale employers, many of which are “household names”, in addition to specialist government departments. Stephen undertakes his own advocacy in the Employment Tribunals and at the Central Arbitration Committee, and has a special interest in trade union recognition and disputes, industrial action, collective bargaining, trade union rights, employment and civil litigation, large-scale reorganisations, collective redundancy and reorganisation projects, and discrimination.
Prior to becoming a lawyer, Stephen was an HR practitioner and held several senior HR roles within both the private and public sector, delivering both organisation-wide strategic people solutions and operational HR, ER and IR support to those that he partnered. Stephen is also a member of the Employment Lawyers Association’s Legislative and Policy Committee, a chartered member of the CIPD and a visiting lecturer for the University of Law, teaching employment law (amongst other subjects) on their post-graduate level teaching programmes.
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