Redundancy Is About the Work, Not the Person: Where Employers Get It Wrong

When an employer tells me, 'We need to make three people redundant', my first question is not how much salary will be saved. It is: why those three? How large is the workforce, and how many other people perform the same or substantially similar work? If management has already selected individuals but cannot explain why their work, rather than somebody else's, is disappearing, the process is starting in the wrong place.

In my experience, that problem arises frequently in smaller and medium-sized employers, particularly businesses with perhaps a dozen to fifty employees. Management knows its people personally, which can make an operational decision look deceptively simple. But redundancy is not a convenient substitute for dealing with an employee who is unpopular, underperforming or considered difficult. The business can make a legitimate change; it still needs a genuine redundancy situation and a fair route to any resulting dismissal.

The role must be at risk, not simply the individual

Under the Employment Rights Act 1996, a redundancy situation can arise from closure of a business or workplace or a diminished requirement for employees to do work of a particular kind. It is not necessary for every individual task to vanish. Work may be divided among remaining employees, automated or reorganised. What matters is whether the employer's requirement for employees to carry out that kind of work has genuinely reduced or is expected to do so.

That distinction is particularly important where a business says somebody's role is redundant while advertising for new staff. Recruitment elsewhere in the business does not automatically invalidate a redundancy, but recruiting to do essentially the same work at the same time invites an obvious question: what requirement has actually disappeared? I have seen employers attempt to manage out a poor performer under the redundancy label while continuing to recruit. If capability is the real concern, it should ordinarily be addressed as capability, not disguised as a change in staffing requirements.

A past example involved a business moving its premises only a short distance. Instead of properly exploring what the move meant for its existing staff, it simply told employees they were being given notice. A workplace move can create a genuine redundancy issue, but the distance between sites is not the whole answer. Contractual mobility provisions, individual travel circumstances, consultation and the suitability of continued or alternative work may all matter. Announcing dismissals is not a substitute for examining those matters.

A pool of one can be legitimate, but it must stand up to scrutiny

I am wary of employers who choose one employee and then build a one-person selection pool around them. Yet a pool of one is not inherently unfair. Modern tools and automation mean some functions previously shared across teams are now performed by a single specialist. In professional services, for example, the old administrative or secretarial pool has often been replaced by individuals who manage much of their own work using software. A genuinely isolated role can therefore disappear without an obvious comparator.

The danger is convenience masquerading as analysis. If several people do overlapping work, share broadly similar skills or could reasonably perform the remaining duties, why were they excluded from consideration? Conversely, if a new system genuinely removes a unique role, can the employer explain what the system now does and why fewer people are needed? Selection should follow an examination of the work, not be reverse-engineered to validate a preferred departure.

Consultation should not be theatre

After two decades dealing with employment matters, I can count on one hand the occasions when consultation has fundamentally changed the employer's proposed business direction. That is an observation from practice, not an argument that consultation is pointless. In many cases, a business faces a real cost pressure or operational change that will not disappear because employees object. Consultation can still affect who is at risk, how the new structure works, what alternative roles are available, the timing of changes and the terms on which people leave.

The problem is when the decision about an individual is final before the first consultation meeting, and the process exists only to manufacture a paper trail. An employer should be prepared to listen, examine alternative proposals and demonstrate what it considered, including reasons for rejecting suggestions. A consultation does not have to produce agreement, nor does it have to save every role. It must be meaningful. If the only acceptable response is agreement with a decision already taken, it is hard to see what the employee is genuinely being consulted about.

For fewer than twenty proposed redundancies, individual consultation remains important to fairness. Where an employer proposes twenty or more redundancies at one establishment within ninety days, statutory collective consultation duties also arise. Since April 6, 2026, the maximum protective award for breaching those collective obligations has been 180 days' pay per affected employee. That is a separate exposure from the underlying dismissal claim.

Look for another job before deciding there is no job

If new equipment has made three roles unnecessary, that may be a perfectly credible explanation for a restructure. I would still want to know whether those employees can be retrained, whether other vacancies exist and whether the remaining roles have been considered fairly. Suitable alternative employment is not an afterthought reserved for employers who can afford generosity. It is part of the redundancy assessment.

There are legal priority rights to suitable alternative vacancies for certain protected employees, including people within the relevant pregnancy and family-leave protection periods. The employer must also be careful about selection criteria that unfairly penalise disability-related absence, pregnancy or protected leave. A business is not required to invent a job, but it should be able to show that it considered realistically available alternatives. The fact that management prefers a particular structure is not proof that no other workable structure exists.

The cost of a mistaken redundancy can exceed the saving

A manufacturing business I encountered some years ago provides a memorable illustration. An employee challenged a purported redundancy and the business ultimately took that employee back. The post had not truly disappeared. Instead of producing a clean reduction in staffing costs, the employer faced the complications and expense of the original exit, the dispute and the person's return. The identifying details are deliberately omitted, but the commercial lesson remains: selecting somebody for redundancy does not make their job redundant.

Employers sometimes calculate the saving from a few months' wages without pricing the management time, notice and holiday liabilities, settlement discussions, possible tribunal proceedings, replacement recruitment and reputational damage. There may also be significant claims where discrimination or another protected ground is involved. From January 1, 2027, ordinary unfair dismissal protection in Great Britain is due to become available after six months rather than two years' service, and the statutory compensatory cap for ordinary unfair dismissal will be removed. Those changes make care especially important. They do not change the general two-year qualifying period for statutory redundancy pay.

Some employers appear to take the view that employees are unlikely to understand or challenge what has happened. That is not an employment strategy; it is a gamble. Even where a claim is eventually defended, the expenditure of time and money can be disproportionate to the payroll saving management originally anticipated.

The five questions I would ask before an at-risk letter

Before identifying employees as at risk, ask: what has changed in the need for work; why have these particular roles or individuals been identified; who else undertakes the same or similar duties; what alternatives, including redeployment and retraining, have genuinely been considered; and what remains open to change through consultation? If the answers are unclear, the process is not ready for an at-risk letter.

There are sound commercial reasons to restructure. There are also employers who use redundancy because it feels easier than confronting a different employment problem. The distinction matters, legally and financially. Employers should be able to defend not just the decision to operate with fewer people, but the route by which they chose who would go.

Aubrey International helps employers examine proposed redundancies, selection and consultation arrangements, and opportunities for redeployment before decisions become difficult to reverse.