FAQs on Redundancy

In the plainest sense of the term, an employee is “at risk” of redundancy from the moment their employer begins considering changes that could lead to their redundancy. The earliest someone becomes legally at risk is not precisely defined, but generally it must be communicated to the employee no later than the start of any formal redundancy consultation, which in turn must take place before any final decision is made around redundancies.

While the legal position is that you should be placed at risk before consultation takes place, ACAS guidance states that, as best practice, employers should notify staff that they are at risk of redundancy as soon as possible.

Please see the section “What an employer should tell employees” in the following ACAS guidance: https://www.acas.org.uk/your-rights-during-redundancy

At the outset of a formal consultation, the University should provide the following details:

• Which roles are at risk of redundancy
• How many redundancies they are considering (sometimes employers will express this as the number of FTE hours to obfuscate the scale of redundancies, but we’d expect them to outline the specific roles at risk of redundancy)
• Why redundancies are being considered
• An outline of their consultation plans – usually a timeline setting out when individual consultation meetings are likely to take place and when final decisions will be delivered.

According to ACAS guidance, staff at risk should be provided with an “outline of [the employer’s] consultation plans and whether they have other options, such as voluntary redundancy or suitable alternative employment.

Essentially, at the beginning of a formal consultation process, you should have a broad overview of the reason for and scale of redundancies, and what the consultation process will look like. You will not necessarily have huge levels of detail at the outset (though some employers have been known to share very detailed consultation documents); your individual consultation meeting is where your main legal right comes in: the University is expected to engage meaningfully with any questions and uncertainties you have about the proposals or the process itself.

If the University is proposing to make 20 or more employees redundant within a 90-day period, there must be collective consultation between the University and campus trade unions. In these circumstances, UCU Dundee officers will engage with the University, obtain as much information as possible, and communicate it to staff accordingly.

A redundancy consultation must happen at a formative stage in the overall consideration of redundancies. An employer must not make a final decision, or make structural changes that make redundancies inevitable (e.g. cutting courses when it is clear that this will make an overall programme financially unviable), before there has been a genuine consultation with staff.

Realistically, employers will decide that they want to make redundancies before a consultation but, legally, they have to be seen to be keeping an open mind. If you obtain any evidence that suggests that the process has been predetermined, keep a record and approach UCU Dundee for advice.

Often there will be a period of suspicion that redundancies are imminent but managers sometimes refuse to disclose the possibility until they are in a position to communicate the fact of a formal consultation to staff. Sometimes all we can do is read the signs – e.g. managers suddenly start becoming cagey about making long-term plans, or there becomes an increasing focus on student numbers and income. Keep a record of any concerns and approach UCU Dundee (or your UCU area rep if you know who they are) to discuss your concerns.

We would aim to challenge the following:

• A formal consultation beginning without staff being made aware that they are at risk of redundancy.
• An employer deciding to proceed with redundancies without meaningful consultation with staff.
• A situation where the employer provides insufficient rationale for the redundancies in the consultation, fails to engage with the points that you wish to put across, or does not actively help you find suitable alternative employment with the University.
In terms of specific timelines for consultation:

20 to 99 redundancies — the consultation must start at least 30 days before any dismissals take effect.

100 or more redundancies — the consultation must start at least 45 days before any dismissals take effect.
Fewer than 20 redundancies – there is no specific timeframe but any consultation must be meaningful, so this cannot be rushed or carried out at the last minute – you should have time to consider the proposals and discuss them in at least one individual consultation meeting.

If you are unclear on any aspect of the proposals or the process, we recommend writing to the relevant manager and/or HR representative with any questions – you do not need to wait for a consultation meeting to be given information.

What does meaningful consultation look like in practice? Should consultation be a genuine opportunity to influence the outcome rather than simply being notification of a decision already made?

Consultation should be a genuine opportunity to influence the outcome and should not be simply a box-ticking exercise on the employer’s part. A redundancy consultation that is not “meaningful or genuine” could give rise to an unfair dismissal claim to the employment tribunal. Many employers will approach it as a box-ticking exercise in practice (and will often read from a script), but it is absolutely your right to:

a) Ask questions about any aspect of the proposals that you are unclear on
b) Share your perspectives on the proposals
c) Make suggestions about how redundancies can be avoided, either on the macro level (e.g. if redundancies are being made due to financial pressures, you could identify efficiency savings that can be made elsewhere), or on the personal level (e.g. suggesting redeployment)
d) Ask your employer to explain what they are doing to avoid your redundancy.

The decision to make you redundant must not be predetermined. If you see any evidence of this in your consultation meeting or elsewhere, please keep a contemporaneous record.

Your employer is not obliged to agree with any perspectives you put forward in your consultation meeting, but it must feel like they have an open mind to them. If you receive unsatisfactory responses, or the manager refuses to answer your questions, this could point to the consultation not being meaningful. An example: your manager might argue that redundancies need to be made due to concerns about departmental finances. We recommend that your employer provides the raw financial data and budgetary information underpinning their concerns. If this is not provided, we can argue that this is not a meaningful consultation. If the employer provides this data, and you notice that key income has not been factored into the calculation, in a meaningful consultation we would expect the employer to re-do the calculation and consider whether there still exists a need to make redundancies. An employer who refuses to even consider recalculating their basis for redundancies could be accused of not meaningfully engaging.

We recommend that staff take a UCU representative or a colleague into their meetings and ensure that the discussion is accurately recorded. If you have concerns about whether a meaningful consultation is taking place, please contact UCU Dundee for support.

If you are employed on a fixed term basis for a specific reason, i.e. to work on a time-limited project or to provide maternity cover for a colleague, you will not be considered to have been made redundant when your contract comes to an end.

If you are not employed to cover a specific task, and your fixed-term contract ends because there is no further need for your work, you should still be considered as having been made redundant if you have two or more years of continuous service. This will reduce to six months’ continuous service from 1 January 2027. You would not be eligible for a paid notice period unless your fixed-term contract is ending early, but you are entitled to formal consultation, consideration for suitable alternative employment, and a redundancy payment.

For example, what records should I keep, what questions should I ask, and what evidence should I gather?

• Keep contemporaneous notes of any discussions – even a quick email to yourself summarising what you heard carries some evidential weight if needed later.
• Obtain and review your job description, contract, and recent appraisals/performance reviews.
• Start thinking about questions you might want to ask in a consultation meeting.
• Familiarise yourself with the University “Managing Organisational Change” policy.
• Redundancy processes can be stressful: if you have concerns that your health might be affected by the process, or that adjustments will be needed to accommodate a pre-existing health condition or disability, please discuss your needs with your manager and consider a referral to occupational health.

Are there recognised strategies for demonstrating flexibility, redeployment potential, retraining opportunities or ongoing business need for my role? What if I feel I’m being blocked in seeking opportunities, for example by my line manager?

Try to resolve any ongoing workplace issues at an early stage. For example, if a health condition or disability is affecting your performance, request an occupational health referral to discuss adjustments that could help address the issue, particularly where performance may be used as a redundancy selection criterion.
• Attempt to address any workload imbalance — for example, if you are taking on too much teaching and are not generating research income, you might wish to engage in informal discussions with your manager to redress this.
• Update your CV
• Diversify your skills and experience — you could increase the chances of being retained by taking on citizenship or leadership roles, or by undertaking additional training, including in soft skills. A restructure could lead to a competitive interview process for remaining jobs, so you might wish to strengthen your chances by doing anything that raises your overall profile. Assume that you might be invited to interview in the near future. However, do not take on so much that it becomes a workload issue.
• The University offers mentoring from senior staff; a mentor might suggest ways to enhance your profile.

If you are feeling blocked by your line manager from these activities:

• Document specific instances, including dates, what was said, why you think the refusal was unreasonable – this is something that could be relied upon in an appeal later on.
• Put requests in writing if you get an initial verbal refusal – it helps establish a paper trail of evidence and managers might be warier about refusing these requests in writing.
• While any unreasonable blocking can ultimately be escalated to the informal or formal stages of the University grievance process, these situations can be sensitive, and it might not always be best to escalate prematurely into open conflict with your line manager, particularly in the lead-up to a redundancy process.

As part of a meaningful consultation, we expect the University to be transparent about how it has devised pools – we recommend asking them to explain. If you are concerned about the pooling decision then this should be challenged.

A pool of one is not necessarily illegitimate where the decision is to remove a specific role from the structure. Compare your role in practice with those around you. The University might say that you have a specific role that they no longer need on paper, but your role may, in practice, be the same as your colleagues’ roles. If so, the pool may have been constructed too narrowly. Look closely at what you actually do.

It is difficult to argue in practice that a given role should be pooled with everyone else in the University, because the University often constructs redundancies at departmental level.

Any employee at risk of redundancy has the right to be considered for suitable alternative employment to avoid redundancy, and employers should help facilitate this.

Suitable alternative employment is defined as a role that has the same (or near-identical) pay, terms and conditions, seniority and level of responsibility. If SAE is accepted, the employee is not made redundant and their new role will immediately commence upon the termination of their existing one.

If an employee is offered SAE and turns it down, they may lose out on their right to a redundancy payment because there is a duty on both employee and employer to find alternatives to redundancy. Turning down SAE is treated as resignation in law.

If the employer offers a role on lower pay, less favourable terms and conditions, lower seniority or responsibility, or, in some cases, with a substantially longer commute, the employee can turn it down and, if no further opportunity arises, will still receive a redundancy payment. Alternatively, there is nothing stopping an employee from accepting a lower-grade role, but we recommend negotiating pay protection. However, employers sometimes only offer this for one to two years.

If you are unsure about whether a vacancy is suitable, you have the right to get a four-week trial period to try the new role without waiving your right to reject the role (if it is unsuitable) and get a redundancy payment.

If there is a disagreement with your employer about what constitutes SAE please reach out to UCU Dundee for support.

How proactive must the employer be, and what evidence should exist to demonstrate that this obligation has been fulfilled?

Employers have to actively help you find another job. Just pointing you to a vacancies webpage isn’t enough – your employer should make sure you’re aware of relevant roles, not just that they technically exist somewhere.
They do not need to flag every vacancy, but the closer the job is to your existing skillset and seniority, the more likely they should flag it to you. You can also ask if there are upcoming job vacancies which have not been advertised yet. Your employer should keep considering alternatives right up to your last day, not just during the consultation.
Your employer is under no obligation to create a bespoke job for you.

Employees are also expected to be proactive in finding alternative jobs. Check for vacancies regularly, ask to be added to any redeployment register, and apply for suitable roles. If an employee refuses to take any steps to take up suitable alternative employment, the employer can potentially refuse to make a redundancy payment.

If so, what evidence is typically most useful? What obligations does an employer have to offer retraining, upskilling or reasonable support to enable redeployment?

Under the University redundancy procedure, an at-risk candidate who meets the essential criteria for a role at interview must be offered the role.

If the University disputes that a role is suitable, or decides that you do not meet the essential criteria, write to your manager stating that you disagree with the decision. Set out how you meet each of the essential criteria, with reference to specific examples and using the STAR criteria, and ask for the recruitment process to be paused while your points are fully considered. If your manager does not engage with this, escalate the matter to your local P&OD team.

The University is expected to provide “reasonable” training to help you take up a role where you meet most, but not all, of the essential criteria. What is “reasonable” is fact-dependent but, in most cases, will generally be a relatively short period of training, for example one to three months, to bridge some skill gaps.

Notice pay
If you are made redundant, you are entitled to your paid contractual notice period. Notice can only be served once the formal consultation has ended and you have received a final decision. Sometimes, the University will choose a termination date before the end of your contractual notice period and make a payment in lieu of notice for the remainder. The University will generally pay your notice pay in the final month of your employment, or in the next pay run. If the University fails to make payment, you have three months to make a claim to the employment tribunal; please contact UCU Dundee for support.

Redundancy pay
If your employment is terminated on redundancy grounds and you have at least two years’ continuous service, you will be entitled to a statutory redundancy payment. You can calculate your entitlement using the calculator on the UK Government website: https://www.gov.uk/calculate-your-redundancy-pay.

Again, payment is usually made in the final month of your employment, or on the next month’s pay date. If the University fails to make payment, you have three months from the date that the payment was due; please approach UCU Dundee for support.

Annual leave

You are entitled to be paid for all accrued but untaken annual leave up to the date of termination.

Pension implications
Pension contributions are not deducted from your redundancy payment. If you are paid in lieu of notice, this is not automatically pensionable unless specifically agreed. If you need advice on the pension implications, please contact pensions@ucu.org.uk and one of our pensions advisers will assist.

Time off to seek work

If you have two years of continuous service, you have a legal right to a reasonable amount of time off to look for another job, and engage in training that will aid your employability into other jobs, but only during your notice period. Your basic legal right is to up to 40% of a week’s pay for this time off, but the University redundancy policy states that you simply get paid time off, so you should in principle get fully paid.

“Reasonable time off” is open to interpretation – but if your manager unreasonably blocks you from taking this time off, please cite the below ACAS guidance or approach us for support.

Appeal rights

If, following consultation, you receive a letter confirming that you will be made redundant, you have the right to appeal the decision. An appeal needs to be submitted within 10 days of the written outcome. Under the redundancy policy, your appeal will be heard within 5 weeks or within the contractual notice period. You are entitled to bring a UCU representative or work colleague. A decision will be communicated in writing within 15 working days of the appeal hearing. If your appeal is unsuccessful, no further internal process is available and your next step would be to negotiate with the University through ACAS and, failing that, raise an unfair dismissal claim with the employment tribunal.