A redundancy has to be about the job, not the person doing it
“House of Lords: redundancyA dismissal that occurs when your employer no longer needs the work you do, either because the business is closing, a workplace is closing, or the requirement for employees to carry out that kind of w... turns on the work that actually reduced, not on what the contract allowed the employer to do.”
A genuine redundancy is judged by what work has actually reduced, not by how widely your contract technically allows your employer to move you around.
- Ask your employer to explain, in concrete terms, what work has reduced and how that connects to your specific role, not just to a general downturn.
- A flexible working or mobility clauseA mobility clause is a term in your employment contract that lets your employer require you to work at a different location. If your employer genuinely needs to use it for a real business reason, rath... in your contract doesn't automatically widen the pool of people considered for redundancy alongside you.
- If the stated reason for your dismissal doesn't match a genuine, factual reduction in the kind of work you did, get advice before accepting it as a lawful redundancy.
The situation
A meat processing company's slaughtering business was shrinking. It closed one of its production lines in the slaughterhall and made a group of plant workers redundant.
Under their contracts, these workers weren't tied to the slaughterhall. They could be, and sometimes were, moved to other parts of the plant such as boning or loading. Two of the workers pushed back: their contracts let them work anywhere in the plant, so surely the whole workforce should have been in the frame for redundancy, not just people from the shrinking department.
What the court found
The House of Lords disagreed with the employees. It set out a two-stage test that still governs whether a dismissal counts as a redundancy at all:
1. Has the need for employees to do work of a particular kind actually gone down?
2. Was the employee's dismissal caused, wholly or mainly, by that reduced need?
The key point: whether someone does "work of a particular kind" is a question of fact about what they actually spend their time doing, not a question about what their contract technically permits. These employees normally worked in the slaughterhall. That's where the work had genuinely disappeared. It didn't matter that their contracts were flexible enough to send them elsewhere on paper.
For more on how statutory redundancy pay itself is calculated once a redundancy is genuine, see our guide on redundancy pay.
For the full picture of what your employer has to get right during a redundancy process, see our guide on being made redundant.
Murray v Foyle Meats Ltd. [1999] UKHL 30; [1999] IRLR 562. House of Lords. 1999.