Category Archives: Employment Rights

How Do You Deal With Redundancies?

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Making people redundant is never an easy thing to do. However, sometimes, for the future of your business, you may find yourself facing this situation. How do you deal with it? What are you required to do by law? What’s the best way to look after your staff and make the process easier for them?

All these questions will be answered in this blog, so do read on.

What do we mean by ‘redundancy’? It is a potentially fair reason for dismissing an employee, but should only be caused by the closure of a business, the closure of a particular workplace, or a diminished need for employees to carry out work of a particular kind.

Carrying out a proper selection process is crucial if unfair dismissals are to be avoided. When you’re selecting employees for redundancy, you must ensure that the “pool” for selection is identified correctly and that the selection criteria used are objective and fairly applied. If your company is closing down the whole business or a particular place of work, the issue of the “pool” for selection will not usually arise since all the employees in that place will potentially be redundant. Where this is not the case, you should consider the following selection criteria:

Redundancy Table

It is good practice for more than one person to be involved in the selection process, to reduce the risk of perceived bias or discrimination. It is sensible to have two people, both of whom know the individual employees concerned, carry out the assessment.

As an employer you are not under a legal obligation to seek volunteers for redundancy, but it is good practice to do so. Enhanced redundancy payments may be used as an incentive for employees to volunteer for redundancy. Early retirement can also be an acceptable alternative to redundancy for both employees and trade unions.

Individual consultation with employees is essential. If you do not carry out such consultation, any subsequent dismissal will almost certainly be unfair. Start with an initial meeting with staff, to announce the likelihood that redundancies will be necessary. You will then need to carry out individual meetings with the employees selected for redundancy. Finally you will need to hold individual meetings at which your employees’ selection for redundancy is confirmed, before writing to those affected.

Making people redundant, for whatever reason, is not easy. There are many pitfalls to be avoided. As it is such a big subject, we have put together a fuller guide on how best to deal with redundancies. You can download it for free from our website by clicking here. If you have any immediate questions concerning your business and redundancies, please click here to email me or call me on 0118 940 3032.

Changes to the National Minimum Wages

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The National Minimum Wage Act 1998 lays down minimum levels of hourly pay for certain employees. The current rate for those aged 21 and over is £6.70 per hour. From 1 April 2016, the National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2016 introduce the national living wage, set at £7.20 per hour, for workers aged 25 and over.

The National Minimum Wage Regulations 2015 make sure that the hourly rate, at which a worker is entitled to be paid in respect of his or her work in any pay reference period, is the rate that is in force on the first day of that period. The pay reference period is a month or, in the case of a worker who is paid wages by reference to a period shorter than a month, that period. Therefore, where a pay reference period begins before 1 April 2016, the old rate of the national minimum wage will apply for that pay reference period.

From 1 April 2016, the National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Regulations 2016 introduce a compulsory national living wage of £7.20 per hour for all workers aged 25 and over. The Regulations also double the financial penalties for which employers will be liable if they are found to have paid any workers below the national minimum wage. The penalty is increased from 100% to 200% of the total underpayment for all workers specified in the HMRC notice of underpayment.

If you need to know more about these changes, how they affect your business and your employees, or how to handle the changes, come to our next Employment Law Update workshop. It is being held on 12 April 2016 in Wargrave, Berkshire and costs just £20 +VAT. Click here for details and online booking.

The Latest News on Zero Hours Contracts

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The Government has banned the right to include an exclusivity clause in Zero Hours contracts. This means that you can’t employ someone on a Zero Hours contract and then try to prevent that person from doing other work, or stop them from working without your consent.

The clause is now illegal, so if any of your employees have this clause in their contract, as their employer, you can no longer enforce it. The ban became legal on 26 May 2015.

Zero Hours contracts, when used correctly, are very effective, e.g. for students during holiday periods or seasonal work. These casual contracts allow employers to hire staff with no guarantee of work. They mean employees work only when they are needed by employers, often at short notice. Their pay depends on how many hours they work. A Zero Hours contract is generally understood to be a contract between an employer and a worker where the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum working hours, and the worker is not obliged to accept any work offered. Zero hours workers have the same employment rights as regular workers, although they may have breaks in their contracts, which affect rights that accrue over time. They are also entitled to annual leave, the National Minimum Wage and pay for work-related travel in the same way as regular workers.

Zero hours contracts can be used to provide a flexible workforce to meet a temporary or changeable need for staff.

Examples may include a need for workers to cover:

  • unexpected or last-minute events (e.g. a restaurant needs extra staff to cater for a wedding party whose original venue cancelled)
  • temporary staff shortages (e.g. an office loses an essential specialist worker for a few weeks due to bereavement)
  • on-call/bank work (e.g. one of the clients of a care-worker company requires extra care for a short period of time).

If you have staff with Zero Hours contracts and you’re not sure if you have the exclusivity clause in those contracts, contact us on 0118 940 3032 or click here to email us and we’ll talk you through it.