Your employer going into administration doesn’t erase your right to redundancy consultation.

The situation

You worked at a company's Canary Wharf office. Within weeks, the company made you and 20 or more colleagues at the same site redundant, without consulting you or an employee representative first. There was no recognised union and nobody had been elected to speak for staff. That doesn't remove your employer's duty to consult. The company went into administration before the case even reached tribunal.

What the tribunal found

Section 188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 sets the rule: consult collectively before making 20 or more people redundant at one workplace within 90 days. This employer hadn't. It made a protective award covering the maximum period the law allows: 90 days' pay. This kind of award exists to punish the failure to consult, not simply to compensate for it, so the full period applies unless there's a specific reason to reduce it. Here, there wasn't one.

If your employer is planning to make 20 or more people redundant at the same workplace within a 90-day window, the law requires them to consult you and your colleagues first, recognised union or not. That consultationA process your employer is required to carry out before making significant decisions that affect you, most commonly redundancy. It must be genuine, meaning your employer must listen and consider what ... has to be genuine, not a formality rolled out once the decisions are already made.

This case also shows that your employer collapsing into administration doesn't erase this right. Administrators can, and often do, accept that a protective award is owed. The Secretary of State steps in as guarantor when the company itself can't pay. So if you were made redundant alongside a group of colleagues with no real consultation, and your former employer has since gone under, that isn't automatically the end of your claim.

Working out whether the 20-person threshold applies to your situation isn't always straightforward. Neither is judging whether whatever consultation did happen was good enough, especially once a company has entered administration. Get advice on whether you're owed a protective award. Don't assume it's too late to claim just because the company has folded.

If your employer has gone under, see our guide on claiming redundancy pay from the government after an employer becomes insolvent. And tribunals take an equally firm line when an employer skips consultation altogether rather than doing it poorly.