You can be entitled to redundancy pay from an agreement you’ve never seen.

The situation

Four former employees of a UK bank were made redundant between 2024 and 2025, as the bank wound down and closed every one of its UK branches, affecting more than 100 staff. Each was paid an enhanced redundancy sum when they left. None of it was calculated under a 1994 agreement between the bank and its former staff association, which set redundancy pay at four weeks' pay for every year of service, capped at 78 weeks. None of the four had ever seen that agreement or knew it existed. They brought a breach of contractWhen one party to an employment contract fails to comply with one of its terms without a lawful reason. Your employer breaching a significant term of your contract can entitle you to resign and claim ... claim, arguing it had been part of their contracts all along.

What the tribunal found

The tribunal found for the claimants on liability after a four-day hearing. Their employment letters incorporated an earlier 1993 agreement between the bank and staff representatives, and that 1993 agreement pointed forward to a redundancy scheme still to be negotiated, which turned out to be the 1994 agreement. Because of that chain, the enhanced redundancy formula was legally part of each claimant's contract, even though nobody had ever shown it to them or told them about it directly. The tribunal added that, even if it was wrong about that chain, the same result would follow anyway. The redundancy terms had been referred to consistently for years in the bank's own personnel policies and internal correspondence, enough to be treated as an implied termA term that forms part of your employment contract even though it is not written down. The duty of mutual trust and confidence is the most important implied term, but others include the duty to pay wa... through custom and practice. The bank had therefore breached the claimants' contracts by paying them less than the agreement guaranteed. This was a liability decision only. Quantum has not yet been decided; a further hearing will fix the final figure, though the tribunal was given a range of £18,000 to £25,000 per claimant.

Your redundancy entitlement is not limited to what is written in the contract you signed or the staff handbook you were given. This applies whether you have already been made redundant or are facing it now. If your employer has ever signed a recognition or collective agreement with a union or staff association, and your own contract points to that document even briefly, you may be entitled to whatever it promises, including terms buried in a separate document that agreement points to in turn. It does not matter that nobody at work ever told you this, or that you never saw the paperwork yourself.

This tends to matter most in workplaces where redundancy terms have built up over decades. A recognition agreement gets signed, then a security agreement, then staff handbooks that quietly reference both. Employers sometimes pay only the statutory minimum, or a modest enhanced rate, without checking whether an older agreement actually promises more. If your employer has ever recognised a trade union or staff association, it is worth asking whether historic agreements like this exist. Check too whether your contract, or the handbook it points to, mentions them even indirectly.

Working out whether an old agreement like this still applies to you usually means digging through paperwork nobody in the building has looked at in years. That is not something to untangle alone. If you think your redundancy pay may have been calculated on the wrong basis, get advice before you accept a settlement or let a time limitThe deadline by which you must submit a claim to an employment tribunal. For most claims the limit is three months less one day from the act you are complaining about, and it is strictly enforced. Mis... pass. An employment adviser or solicitor can check whether historic terms like these still bind your employer. For another situation where employees were owed more redundancy money than they expected, see our case study on missed redundancy consultation.