You raise some interesting issues and I have been seeing and hearing from clients, or prospective clients, making very similar points. An employer needs to tread carefully though because if they cannot make a reasonable case for terminating a person’s employment on grounds of capability, they will end up facing a claim for unfair dismissal. To “do” a performance dismissal properly (in the absence of glaring inefficiency or inability to do the job) is a long winded process requiring realistic and achievable targets to be set and reasonable time limits for achieving the targets.

Age discrimination is a good point as well. All I can say on this is try and gather as much evidence as possible. Just because you might be the oldest person to be selected for redundancy is not going to be enough to succeed with a claim for age discrimination. Take legal advice early on about the situation because age discrimination claims are complex.

I’m glad you like the blog – thanks!

First of all I’ve only just discovered your blog but I plan to refer to it from now onward.

If you will indulge my observations on what is going on with redundancy then I would say that employers (big employers) are keen to avoid paying redundancy if they can possibly avoid it. Curiously enough employers do still wish to lose head-count in their cost-cutting exercises!

Of the legally valid ways of dismissing folks I believe that some employers are preferring to put more effort into annual reviews and eventually dismissing them on the ground of competency. For example, I have witnessed the retrofitting of metrics in order to justify the missing of objectives thus enabling them to ‘performance manage’ folks out of their jobs. These are jobs in which these employees were not selected for redundancy in previous years’ redundancy activity when they were deemed vital at that time.

Paranoid? Perhaps but I have also seen an increase in ETO like reasons to re-evaluate the workforce to meet commercial pressures and this give rise to job reclassifications that are demotions in all but name.

Coincidentally the above areas frequently appear to impact older workers; i.e., workers who may be a few years away from pensionable age. If they are lucky enough to be on a DB scheme then any ‘demotion’ (often passively accepted in the face of the alternative) means devaluation of their eventual retirement package.

In my experience older workers are mostly hard-working but they are a vulnerable group. I’d welcome your views on how to get to a discrimination claim in the above circumstances. Is it sufficient in your view to justify a breach of trust and confidence?

I fear I have strayed somewhat from the subject of redundancy but I believe employees are going to be presented by evasive tactics and I suggest that it may be worth spending some blog time on how to keep one step ahead of cunning (well briefed) employers.

P¬)