Is My Redundancy Lawful?

beethoven_ii

My employer has informed me he wishes to make my position redundant as they feel they need to restructure the company to reduce costs. They plan to merge 2 departments and say that the managerial responsibilities of the business for which I am currently responsible will be undertaken by other Managers and Directors of the company. What exactly these “management responsibilities” are hasn’t been defined by anyone. They have offered me another position with the company as an engineer at a lower pay rate, with the loss of management status and my company car. Every aspect of the job description they have given me for the new role on offer is already part of my existing responsibilities. My current role as a Manager is part engineering and part management therefore I am not entirely an overhead as they charge customers for my services. There are other Managers within the company of a similar standing who's roles are purely overhead and they bring no additional income into the business.

My question is whether the reason to choose to make me redundant is lawful under The Employment Rights Act of 1996 which states:

139 Redundancy
(1) For the purposes of this Act an employee who is dismissed shall be taken to be dismissed by reason of redundancy if the dismissal is wholly or mainly attributable to—
(a) the fact that his employer has ceased or intends to cease—
(i) to carry on the business for the purposes of which the employee was employed by him, or
(ii) to carry on that business in the place where the employee was so employed, or
(b) the fact that the requirements of that business—
(i) for employees to carry out work of a particular kind, or
(ii) for employees to carry out work of a particular kind in the place where the employee was employed by the employer,
have ceased or diminished or are expected to cease or diminish.

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None of the work carried out by me in my current role has ceased or diminished, nor is it expected to do so anymore than for anyone else’s position at the company, the company just want to change who does what bits of it and pay me less for doing basically the same thing as I'm already doing. Is this lawful?


All advice would be appreciated, whether it be informed or just opinion.

therealdessie

The crux of the argument is that one part of your role can be carried out by other people - that would make redundancy valid, and by offering alternate employment they have covered their bases.

Sadly the perceived value of an employee rarely matters in these situations.

If the diminished role doesn't include management responsibilities, then I don't understand how you believe you're being asked to do the same job for less pay. There is clearly a premium for managerial work which they're removing, hence their argument (whether it's fair/nice is another matter). I'm not sure you'd have an argument there as they have followed the procedure in place - unless you can prove that the department would suffer considerably without your input it's going to be hard to rebut against this.