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One of the most important aspects of redundancy law is the provision of redundancy pay, which seeks to compensate you as an employee for your dismissal with a tax-free sum that proportionately reflects the length of service you have given to your company, provided you have been working there for more than two years.
Although often used by many people as a synonym for any kind of dismissal, redundancy is actually a well-defined legal term that refers to a specific type of dismissal. Redundancy is when a person is dismissed because they are no longer needed by their employer. Generally, this happens for one of three reasons:
According to redundancy law, a redundancy may count as unfair dismissal if unreasonable criteria have been used to select the individual being made redundant. For the redundancy to be fair, your employer must have created a justifiable set of criteria which are used to select the employee or employees to be made redundant (e.g. length of service, skills, qualifications or disciplinary proceedings), and must then apply these criteria rigorously and without bias to all employees being considered for redundancy.
If your employer can be shown to have selected you for redundancy using irrelevant or unjustifiable criteria (such as age, sex, race or disability), then they have clearly not carried out the selection process in a fair manner, and there is every likelihood that the redundancy can be classed as unfair dismissal, for which you can make a claim in the Employment Tribunal. You may also have a claim for discrimination.
If you believe that your redundancy rights are being infringed, or simply wish to know what your redundancy rights are, Ashby Cohen can provide you with detailed advice. We specialise in employment law cases, and our years of experience as employment lawyers make us uniquely qualified to assist you with any redundancy issues you may have. Please contact us for an initial free consultation.
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