Once you have explored all the avenues to avoid a redundancy programme, you may find you still have no choice but to make one or more compulsory redundancies. Your starting point then will be to fairly select those employees who may need to be made redundant. You should write to the employee setting out in detail the business reasons behind the proposed redundancy programme, advising them of their provisional selection for redundancy and the grounds for their selection.

After the completion of your full and fair consultation procedure, you then need to decide whether or not an employee is to be made redundant. You must write advising them of the outcome of the redundancy consultation process and notifying them that their position is now redundant. It is only when the consultation process has been completed that final decisions to dismiss can be made and confirmed in writing to employees. Use our Redundancy Termination Notice for this.

You’re likely to be in unfair dismissal territory if the selection criteria you use to decide which employees are to be chosen for redundancy are not objectively chosen and fairly applied. This is a two-stage process. The first is deciding on the selection criteria you are going to use. The second stage is to then put those criteria into a matrix and adopt a fair marking system.

Redundancy is a potentially fair reason for dismissal, but you must still act reasonably. This means that you must properly explore other options to redundancy, fully consult with the affected employees, adopt a fair selection procedure and consider the potentially redundant employees for alternative employment if any is available.

First redundancy consultation letter Redundancy law is much more complex than paying an employee off. There must be a genuine redundancy situation and you must treat the employee fairly in the procedure you use prior to the dismissal decision being taken. The starting point is to explore whether compulsory redundancies can be avoided, for example by asking for volunteers, or considering other cost-cutting measures.