Query on date of notice.

phoenix85

Hi all,

My employer of nearly 8 years went into liquidation in September of this year.

We were all given letters on that date detailing our situation and that we would need to apply to the Redundancys Payments Office for our redundancy, notice, holiday pay and outstanding wages.

We completed the forms ASAP back in September. However there was no progress on these and apparently the Liquidator / Insolvency Practitioner has only sent these off to the RPO in the past few weeks!

The story behind the delay is that apparently one of my ex employers clients still owed a considerable sum of money. Part of that companies terms of contract said they did not have to pay any outstanding money if their sub contractor went into liquidation.

Therefore the liquidator held off in putting the company into liquidation to avoid that situation developing.

My worry surrounding that is that according to Companies House my employer went into liquidation on 29/11/2011. Whereas for me it was 02/09/11 and that is the date that is on our letters terminating our employment.

So really my query is if the company did not go into liquidation until 29/11 does the RPO take this as the effective start date of all the employees notice periods or is the 02/09 when we were made redundant?

Thanks.

SarEl

This isn't a problem. They relevant date for the RPO will be the date you were "turfed out" so to speak. What has happened isn't uncommon. The RPO will not pay (obviously) if there is any prospect of the employer paying all or part of the bill from assets. Employees get paid first before anyone else. So the IP couldn't forward the forms until s/he could say that the employer had no assets to pay.

phoenix85

Thanks SarEl, that is good to know it won't affect me now.

I did have a second job and have increased the hours since I was made redundnat. During my 'notice' I was trying not too work too much (like 7 days a week!) although I obviously still needed to bring in an amount to pay bills.

phoenix85

Good news is I received my redundancy and unpaid wages last week. Filled in form RP2 and will send that off tomorrow (think that's the first postal collection?).

The bad thing is I lose half my notice pay through my earnings. But hey ho, if I hadn't earned that I would be overdrawn at the bank right now and that's what I want to avoid!

SarEl

Good news then. And to be fair about the notice pay - if you had seen the writing on the wall and got a job quicker, you wouldn't have had anything! So it's a nice bonus, but the work is a better one