Pillar Guide · Updated July 2026
UK Redundancy Consultation Process: A Practical Guide for 2026/27
Redundancy consultation is one of the most heavily litigated areas of UK employment law — a process that is easy to get procedurally wrong even where the underlying business reason for job cuts is genuine. This pillar guide explains the difference between individual and collective consultation, the 20-employee and 100-employee thresholds that trigger collective duties, the 30 and 45-day minimum consultation periods, fair selection criteria, the HR1 notification requirement, and the protective award risk for employers who get it wrong.
What Redundancy Consultation Is
Redundancy consultation is the legally required process an employer follows before confirming redundancy dismissals, giving affected employees a genuine opportunity to understand why redundancies are proposed, discuss alternatives, comment on how selection will work, and raise their own suggestions before any final decision is taken. Genuine consultation must happen while the proposals are still at a formative stage — a process run after the decision has effectively already been made, purely to satisfy a procedural box-ticking exercise, does not meet the legal standard and is a common ground for successful unfair dismissal claims.
UK law distinguishes between individual consultation, which applies in every redundancy situation regardless of numbers, and collective consultation, an additional and more formal statutory duty that is triggered once an employer proposes a sufficient number of redundancies at one establishment within a defined time window.
Individual Consultation
Even where only one employee is at risk of redundancy, fairness under the Employment Rights Act 1996 (as interpreted through case law, notably Polkey v A E Dayton Services) requires the employer to consult that individual meaningfully — explaining the business reason for the proposed redundancy, the selection pool and criteria if relevant, exploring possible alternatives (redeployment, reduced hours, voluntary redundancy), and giving the employee a genuine chance to respond and put forward alternative suggestions before a final decision is confirmed.
Individual consultation typically runs across at least two meetings — an initial “at risk” meeting setting out the proposal, and a further meeting to discuss the employee's response and confirm the outcome — with the right to be accompanied by a colleague or trade union representative at formal meetings, and a right of appeal against the final decision.
Collective Consultation Thresholds
Section 188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 imposes an additional collective consultation duty where an employer proposes to dismiss 20 or more employees as redundant at one establishment within a period of 90 days or less. This threshold counts proposed redundancies across the whole 90-day window, not just those confirmed on a single date — an employer cannot avoid the duty by staggering announcements if the total proposed redundancies within any rolling 90-day period reach 20 or more.
Where the threshold is met, the employer must consult with appropriate representatives — either a recognised independent trade union, or elected employee representatives where no union is recognised — in addition to, not instead of, individual consultation with each affected employee. “One establishment” is interpreted based on where employees are actually assigned to work, which can matter significantly for multi-site employers deciding whether the threshold is met at any single location.
The 30 and 45-Day Minimum Periods
Where 20 to 99 redundancies are proposed at one establishment within 90 days, consultation must begin at least 30 days before the first dismissal takes effect. Where 100 or more redundancies are proposed within the same period, the minimum period extends to 45 days before the first dismissal.
These are statutory minimums, not maximums — genuinely meaningful consultation on a complex reorganisation often runs considerably longer, and rushing consultation to fit exactly the minimum period, without allowing time for representatives to properly consider and respond to proposals, risks being found inadequate even if the calendar days technically add up. No dismissal notice can take effect before the applicable minimum period has run from the start of consultation.
The HR1 Notification
Where the 20-or-more collective consultation threshold is met, the employer must also notify the Secretary of State using form HR1, submitted to the Insolvency Service before consultation begins. The notification gives central government early visibility of large-scale job losses, enabling support such as Jobcentre Plus Rapid Response teams to engage with affected employees on job search, retraining and benefits support at an early stage.
Failure to submit the HR1 notification when required is a criminal offence under section 194 of the 1992 Act, prosecutable against the employer (historically pursued relatively rarely in practice, but a real legal risk distinct from the separate civil liability for consultation failures covered by the protective award regime).
What Must Be Consulted On
Collective consultation must cover, at minimum: ways of avoiding the proposed dismissals altogether; ways of reducing the number of employees to be dismissed; and ways of mitigating the consequences of the dismissals for those affected — commonly addressed through voluntary redundancy schemes, redeployment opportunities, retraining, extended notice, or enhanced severance terms.
The employer must also disclose specific written information to representatives, including the reasons for the proposals, the numbers and descriptions of employees affected and employed at the establishment, the proposed method of selecting employees for redundancy, the proposed method and likely timing of carrying out the dismissals, and the method of calculating any redundancy payments beyond the statutory minimum.
Selection Criteria
Where a “pool” of employees carry out similar or interchangeable roles and only some of them are being made redundant, the employer must identify that pool fairly and apply objective, consistently scored selection criteria across everyone in it. Common criteria include skills, qualifications and experience relevant to the remaining business need; performance and disciplinary record based on documented evidence; attendance record (excluding any absence related to disability, pregnancy or maternity, which cannot lawfully be scored against an employee); and, sometimes, length of service as one factor among several (rather than as the sole determining criterion, which risks age discrimination).
Criteria that indirectly disadvantage a protected group — for example, systematically favouring full-time over part-time employees without objective business justification, which can indirectly discriminate against women who are statistically more likely to work part-time — expose the employer to both unfair dismissal and discrimination claims, in addition to any consultation failures.
What Happens If Consultation Fails
An individual employee with at least two years' continuous service who believes their redundancy dismissal was procedurally unfair because consultation was inadequate, or the decision was effectively pre-determined before consultation began, can bring an unfair dismissal claim to an employment tribunal. Even where the underlying business reason for redundancy is genuine, a poor consultation process alone can render the dismissal unfair.
A narrow “special circumstances” defence exists for failing to properly collectively consult — for example, a genuinely sudden insolvency event making full compliance impracticable — but tribunals interpret this defence strictly, and it is rarely successful in practice, since employers facing financial pressure are still generally expected to consult to the extent realistically possible in the circumstances.
The Protective Award
Where an employer fails to properly collectively consult — not consulting at all, not consulting for the required minimum period, or not properly disclosing the required information to representatives — affected employees or their representatives can claim a protective award at an employment tribunal, compensating for the employer's failure regardless of whether proper consultation would ultimately have changed the outcome for any individual employee.
A protective award can be up to 90 days' actual pay per affected employee for the most serious failures (such as no consultation at all), and is not subject to the statutory weekly pay cap applied to other tribunal remedies such as the basic award for unfair dismissal. Because the award applies per employee across the whole affected group, a large-scale redundancy exercise with a complete or serious consultation failure can create very substantial financial exposure — a key reason employers running sizeable redundancy programmes generally take specialist HR and legal advice to get the process right from the outset.