Where an employer is proposing to dismiss as redundant 20 or more employees at “one establishment” within a period of 90 days or less, it must undertake collective redundancy consultation.

The Labour Government has proposed changes to the collective redundancy consultation framework. The proposed changes, if passed, are potentially significant for employers and affect two main areas:

• Removal of “one establishment”.
• Potential increases to the remedies available to employees.

Removing the “one establishment” threshold means that large employers with multiple sites will have to engage in collective redundancy consultation if they are carrying out multiple small-scale unrelated redundancy processes across different sites (but which collectively add up to 20 or more redundancies) within a 90-day period.

Employers will need to keep track of unrelated redundancies across different sites, and it is likely that collective consultation is going to be triggered more regularly. This could also lead to inadvertent breaches by employers where different sites operate independently.

There will be practical challenges in such situations. For example, how will employers appoint appropriate representatives across different worksites and when the redundancies are unconnected? How will employers consult across multiple unconnected worksites? How will employers keep track of individual redundancies that may not have been traditionally centrally managed?

There will also be uncertainty in relation to the circumstances in which overseas employees should be included in collective consultation.

If it looks as if the proposals to remove the concept of “one establishment” are going to pass, employers will need to consider:

• How it will track and manage redundancies over different sites.
• How it will conduct consultation in practice, where a union is not recognised. It may be that having a standing consultation body of employee representatives for all sites will become more attractive.

Source: Lexology