Ian Smith confronts some familiar HR horrors in the redundancy pool
Two of the three cases considered this month concern redundancy selection, a topic unfortunately much to the fore in the current climate. The first is a useful reminder of one of the eternal verities here, namely that for an employer’s selection to survive a legal challenge it will usually be necessary to show that objective criteria were used, and applied fairly. In the early days of employment protection law, criteria such as “we will get rid of those whom, in the opinion of the managing director, we can best do without” regularly bit the judicial dust. This recent decision goes further and suggests the continuing importance not just of having acceptable criteria in the first place, but also of being seen to stick to them.
The second case raises that well-known HR horror of having in the redundancy pool an employee off on maternity leave, a complication potentially so difficult that a major law firm was held by a tribunal and the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) to have got it wrong
