Collective redundancy consultation: what your employer has to do if 20+ people are affected

If your employer is planning redundancies across a whole team or site, the law gives your employer extra duties on top of the usual individual 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... process. Whether those duties were actually followed can make a real difference to what you’re owed.

When collective consultation kicks in

Your employer has to collectively consult when it is proposing to dismiss 20 or more employees at one establishmentIn collective redundancy law, your "establishment" usually means your specific workplace, site, or business unit, not the whole company. Whether the 20+ employee threshold for collective consultation ... within a 90-day period. This is a different, wider test from the one used for an individual redundancy dismissal, so it can apply even in situations that don’t feel like a classic “redundancy” to you.

Voluntary redundancies still count towards that 20-person threshold. If your employer is asking for volunteers as well as compulsory selections, the volunteers aren’t set aside from the calculation just because nobody is being forced out.

What “proposing to dismiss” actually means

The duty to consult starts once your employer has formed an actual, specific proposal to make redundancies, not just when the idea is first floated. In practice, that point often arrives earlier than employers admit. A board recommending closure can be enough on its own, even before shareholders sign off. And if the closure and the redundancies that follow are genuinely tied together, the duty to consult can reach back to the closure decision itself.

If your employer says consultation only needed to start once the final decision was signed off, that’s not necessarily right. What matters is when a real proposal existed, not when the paperwork was finished.

The minimum consultation period

The law sets a minimum length of time that must pass before the first dismissal can take effect, counted from when consultation begins:

• 20 to 99 redundancies at one establishment: at least 30 days.
• 100 or more redundancies at one establishment: at least 45 days.

These are minimums, not a fixed script. Genuine consultation can, and often should, run longer, especially on a complex or unionised site.

Consultation has to be genuine, not a formality

The consultation has to happen while your employer’s mind is still genuinely open to being persuaded, not after the outcome has effectively been decided. Not every detail needs to be finalised the moment consultation starts. Courts have accepted that an employer can still have a genuinely open mind even after scoring has taken place, as long as it would actually reconsider a score or a criterion if someone raised a good challenge. A Court of Appeal case on exactly this point shows how tribunals draw that line in practice.

What tips this over into unfair is an employer that treats consultation as a box to tick after the real decision is already locked in. Ask yourself whether anything you or your representatives said during the process could plausibly have changed the outcome. If the answer is clearly no, that’s worth raising.

Below the 20-person threshold, there’s no separate legal duty to consult the wider workforce generally, though your employer still owes you individual consultation as part of a fair redundancy process.

If your employer doesn’t consult properly

Failing to comply with the collective consultationCollective consultation is the legal process an employer must follow with employee representatives when proposing to make 20 or more people redundant at one establishment within 90 days. It is separat... duty gives you and your colleagues a claim for a protective awardCompensation an employment tribunal can order, up to 13 weeks' gross pay per employee, when an employer fails to properly inform or consult staff before a TUPE transfer., worth up to 90 days’ pay per affected employee, uncapped by the normal statutory weekly pay limit.

Where there’s been no consultation at all, tribunals start from the maximum 90 days and only reduce it for genuine mitigating circumstances, not simply because the employer says the outcome would have been the same anyway. That argument doesn’t work as a defence to the protective award, whatever it might mean for other claims.

A claim for a protective award has to reach an employment tribunalAn independent court that hears disputes between employees and employers. It is free to bring a claim as a claimant, and most hearings take place in public. within three monthsThe standard time limit for bringing most employment tribunal claims, running from the date of the act complained of. Because the limit is three months less one day, you should not wait until what fee... of the date your last dismissal took effect (via AcasThe Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service. A public body that provides free, impartial guidance on workplace rights and disputes, and runs the mandatory early conciliation process before any ... early conciliationA free process run by ACAS that you must go through before you can submit a claim to an employment tribunal. ACAS contacts your employer to see if a settlement can be reached, and the process pauses y... first). A tribunal can extend this only where it genuinely wasn’t reasonably practicable to claim in time, so don’t wait to find out.

Use our redundancy consultation checklist to work through whether your employer’s process actually meets these requirements. If you think it’s been skipped or rushed, book a call to talk through what happened.