Redundancy and rights: your FAQs

Acas adviser Chau Doan covers the main questions employees have been asking about redundancy and rights. We look at:

What to do if you think you’ve been made redundant unfairly How to encourage your employer to look at alternatives to redundancy (if they aren’t already) Your rights around changing contracts Pay and notice periods

Plus why checking your contract, communicating early and following the process is so important. It's a huge topic and we couldn't cover everything - but watch this space for more content about redundancies involving large numbers of staff.

Episode links

Your rights and redundancy: https://www.acas.org.uk/your-rights-during-redundancy

Redundancy pay calculator: https://www.gov.uk/calculate-your-redundancy-pay

Acas helpline: 0300 123 1100

Coping with redundancy: https://www.mind.org.uk/workplace/coronavirus-and-work/coping-with-redundancy/

Transcript

Sarah Guthrie Hello and welcome to The Acas podcast. I'm Sarah Guthrie, part of the communications team here at Acas and today, I'm joined by Chau Doan, who's part of our helpline team working incredibly hard at the moment to advise employers and employees on everything to do with the workplace. Today, we're looking at redundancy, what employees are particularly ringing us about the moment. We've seen calls on the helpline about redundancy go up by more than double. And I wonder Chau, if you could just start off by giving us an insight into what kind of questions you've been getting from employees around redundancy at the moment?

Chau Doan Hi, Sarah. So yes, we have been receiving a lot of calls regarding redundancy, especially now the news has just been announced that we're going through a recession at this moment in time. So we've been getting a lot of people actually worried about their job status. So they're concerned that whether if they're on furlough now, whether there's still a job for them to return back to. Or if they're going through consultation at this moment in time, what their rights are, or essentially if the employee has already given formal notice of the redundancy, what they can do to address that situation that they're in as well.

Sarah Guthrie Okay, so let's start off with that point you just mentioned there about what can you do if you've been given notice of redundancy but you feel like it's been unfair or you don't think the decision has been the right decision. What do you do about that as an employee?

Chau Doan So we would advise that if they have any concerns regarding their redundancy, or they believe that the redundancy was not genuine as such, then we would advise them to speak to the employer first to raise that concern to them. Now, it might be the case that if they have been given formal notice of the redundancy, the employer should also inform them how to appeal that decision as well. There might be certain instructions that the employer has to follow to go for that the appeals process to that but we normally advise that you should be best practice for the employer to allow the employees to appeal that decision if they disagree with their redundancy. If it's the case that the employer does accept the appeals process to that then they should then invite the employees to an appeal meeting to discuss that between them during that period of time and in essence that would be their opportunity to bring anything forward to the table that they're having concerns about. And they would normally have the right to be accompanied by another work colleague or Trade Representative in that appeal meeting between them and employer as well.

Sarah Guthrie Okay, so usually your employees should have let you know that if you disagree with a decision you can appeal and how to do it and even bring someone along to that. That sounds like quite a stressful, obviously, discussion for everybody involved, what advice would you have for employees who are in that position about how to conduct that appeal really well?

Chau Doan So