Training Cost agreements & TUPE

CamelDan

Hi,
Hopefully someone can offer some advice on an issue that I may be facing...

I have recently been TUPE'd over to a new company who have almost immediately started a restructure/redundancy process. Currently I am in a departmental "pool" with the plan being to remove 50% of the team. Even if I do keep a job, I'm not sure I want to stick around anyway as the atmosphere is pretty toxic.

10 months prior to the business takeover my employer paid for me to go on some training courses totalling about 3 months salary, with an agreement to pay back (sliding scale) if I left within 3 years. The training was specific to an IT system that the new company has now pulled the plug on, so my current role is effectively redundant anyway.

I understand that contracts of employment are maintained, but I cannot find any information about dedicated training agreements, so my question is... if I'm one of the "lucky" ones who isn't made redundant but decide to leave anyway, will the training cost agreement still stand, even if that training cannot be used? I've had a good look for answers to this, but haven't been able to find anything that mentions this specific scenario, so any advice or pointers on where to find an answer,  would be most appreciated.

Many thanks in advance.

CD

getmore4less

Quite important in training payback contracts to get "good leaver" like redundancy  exclusions.

Also(but harder) where the training is specific, clauses that say only while employed to use those skills to avoid getting trapped in new roles.

Unless you got redundancy excluded from the payback they could have a a go at getting it paid back anyway.


Could be pretty easy to make sure you are on the redundancy list with appropriate discussions during consultation when the suitable alternative come up.

Are you sure they are aware of these contractual paybacks?

CamelDan

Thanks for the response 👍
TBH, it didn't cross my mind at the time that redundancy might be a thing... short sighted possibly, but we live and learn!

Our internal HR are certainly aware of the payback clause, but the whole redundancy process is being handled by external HR consultants and our internal HR team are also up for redundancy too, so I'm hoping they are keeping quiet about it.