Employment Law - What Is Redundancy?

Redundancy is a form of dismissal in which strategic business reasons are behind the decision instead of questions of ability or conduct on the part of the employees. Redundancy is known as a potentially fair form of dismissal as it is a situation where an employer needs to reduce the number of employees for various economic reasons.

Redundancy is thought to be a fair dismissal of an employee if:

• The job for which you were employed is no longer workable
• The company is going to be shut down or is going to move its location
• A new form of technology or system has meant there is no need for you in the company
• The company may need to cut costs to pay off debts and become more competitive and therefore some jobs need to be cut

These reasons are all considered fair for an individual to be made redundant. The practice of 'bumping', whereby someone is made redundant and then given another employees job thereby making that employee redundant, is technically fair but it is just a lot harder to justify.

If a person is made redundant by an employer then they should have been selected in a fair way, should receive any redundancy pay that the employer owes them, and should be consulted before and given the proper amount of notice that should be specified in the employment contract.

If these things don't happen or the employer has not followed the redundancy procedure properly or, in worst case scenarios, they have used redundancy to hide the actual reason for a person's dismissal, the employee will then have grounds for a potential claim of unfair dismissal to be brought before an Employment Tribunal. The Tribunal can award compensation for unfair dismissal or even get the employee reinstated in their former position.

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