Your job and the law

If 20 or more employees are affected in any way, the likelihood is that statutory consultation rules will apply – these give increased protection for employees.

The Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 says that if you are an affected employee, you must be informed and consulted within 30 or 90 days, (depending on the number of employees concerned) if your employer “proposes to dismiss” 20 or more employees as redundant. If your employer breaches these regulations, the penalties are onerous and could lead to a protective award of up to 90 days’ pay being paid to you and every other affected employee irrespective of whether or not consultation would have made a difference.

For the purpose of these regulations, the definition of “redundancy” is wider than the one used to establish statutory redundancy entitlement. Under the act redundancy means a dismissal, which is not necessarily related to the individual employee concerned.

In Hardy v Tourism South East (2004) the Employment Appeals Tribunal ruled that statutory consultation rules apply whenever an employer intends to restructure the terms and conditions of a group of employees even if they are not necessarily intending to dismiss them for redundancy. The employer’s hope that it might be able to redeploy certain or indeed all of the employees to different jobs did not alter this conclusion.

If your employer is embarking on an exercise to change terms and conditions, such as moving away from incremental pay scales to a performance-based pay system, it could be required to consult with you for a minimum of 30 or 90 days. Even if your employer believes that consent to the changes will be forthcoming from most, or indeed all, of its workforce, it will need to take account of its obligations to consult. If it does not, it could face claims from all affected workers.