There are two potential claims when dealing with a redundancy situation. Firstly, if an employee is dismissed by reason of redundancy and has at least 2 years' service, he/she is entitled to a statutory redundancy payment from his/her employer. If this is not paid, the employee can claim a statutory redundancy payment from an Employment Tribunal. If the employer has a contractual enhanced redundancy scheme, the employee is entitled to those enhanced terms inclusive of his/her statutory entitlements.

Secondly, if an employee is dismissed by reason of redundancy but the redundancy is not carried out in a fair manner, with adequate consultation, then the employee can bring a claim for unfair dismissal and/or wrongful dismissal (if a contractual redundancy policy exists which has been breached). The employee would need to have 1 year's service.

The time limits to submit each claim are 6 months from the last working day for a redundancy payment and 3 months from the last working day for unfair dismissal.

When making employees redundant, an employer must consider the following issues:

All the above factors must be addressed in order to avoid liability for unfair dismissal and unpaid redundancy payments.