Making an employee redundant

Staff selection - compulsory

The selection criteria your company adopts should be set out in your written procedures. Your criteria must be objective and applied consistently to ensure that employees are not unfairly selected. You must be careful to avoid any discrimination. See our guide on how to prevent discrimination and value diversity.

Among the variety of criteria that can be used to select employees for redundancy are:

• Last in, first out - this can work on a department or company-wide basis. It's objective and easy to apply and administer, but you may end up losing workers with key skills. If recent recruitment has helped to counter inequalities in the workplace, then by selecting the latest recruits for redundancy you could be indirectly discriminating.
• Skills, qualifications and aptitude - these can help keep a balanced workforce for the future.
• Standard of work performance - with this method, you need to provide supporting objective evidence, for example from the company's appraisal system. See our guide on how to use appraisals to manage performance.
• Adaptability - it may be important for your business that employees accept different types of work as needs change - but ensure that your basis for assessment does not discriminate.
• Attendance/disciplinary record - you must apply this method consistently, and be sure your records are accurate and that you understand the reasons for absences. For example, you must not include absences for maternity, paternity or adoption leave.

Automatic unfair selection criteria

Certain selection criteria are automatically unfair. They include:

• trade union membership, non-membership or activity
• legal industrial action lasting up to eight weeks, or longer in some circumstances
• certain employee representative reasons
• actions taken on specified health and safety grounds
• reasons associated with pregnancy, maternity, paternity, adoption and parental leave
• reasons relating to regulations on part-time workers

Different laws govern Northern Ireland. For information call the Northern Ireland Redundancy Payments Helpline on Tel 0800 585 811.

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• What is redundancy?
• Avoiding redundancies
• Staff selection - non-compulsory
• Staff selection - compulsory
• The redundancy consultation process
• Rights of redundant employees
• How to help redundant employees
• Potential problems following redundancy

 

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