Redundancy and Redeployment

[hammyhound]

OH works in a team of 5. They have been through the consultation period and were told 1 had to go and all were offered voluntary but no-one took it. A similar vacancy in another part of the company was offered. OH asked about it and was told go for an informal interview which he did. They told him to start next week great he said and was told that due to him taking up new employment everyone's job was safe. He has now been told that when he starts he has a 4 week trial period. We have checked this up and this is the norm apparently. He has been told that if the redeployment is unsuccessful they will dismiss him with the redundancy he should receive.

 

He now believes that this is unfair as he felt by changing to another part of the company he had not only saved his own job but also the other 4. He feels very let down and now wishes he stayed and hoped that the redundancy was not him. I feel that the company are being unfair as he has done the same job for the last 8 years but because the new manager doesn't know is trialling him out. I feel that after the trial period if he is unsuccessful he should go back into the pot of selection for redundancy. All terms and conditions and salary remain the same in the new position.

 

What do people think. It has been an up and down rollercoaster for the last 4 weeks. The best thing about all this is that they were only told officially 4 weeks ago that 1 had to go by the end of this month. They had heard chinese wispers but nothing official until 4 weeks ago.

[becky2585]

Hello

 

I can see why you would be aggrieved by this situation.

 

The legal difficulty is that an offer of suitable alternative employment (and the statutory trial period) has to be offered before the contract terminates to be valid. However, the current legal position suggests that in actual fact, for the statutory regime to apply, the employee must actually be notified that they have been selected for redundancy before the alternative vacancy is offered - otherwise it could simply be treated as redeployment.

 

What that means in practice is that technically speaking, the statutory four week trial period is unlikely to apply. So if the employer wants to dismiss your OH after four weeks, they would need a potentially fair reason to do so. That could be redundancy, but only if they effectively started the whole consultation again (and arguably as he has changed role it may not be appropriate to pool in the same way).

 

There could be a theoretical claim for unfair dismissal in these circumstances, but it would probably fall to whether or not your OH would have been selected for redundancy if he hadn't effectively been redeployed, which can be difficult to predict!