Furlough to redundancy – what are the correct procedures to follow?

7/14/2020

Rishi Sunak’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme has been designed to minimise the number of redundancies over the next few months.

However, despite the measures put in place, many will still sadly lose their jobs. In this blog, we take a look at the correct procedures to follow when turning a period of furloughed leave into a redundancy.

What happens after furlough ends?
According to a survey conducted in April, 70% of private UK companies had furloughed staff already, affecting some 8.4 million workers. With many companies facing an uncertain future, there are bound to be difficult decisions regarding what to do when employees are due to return to work.

At the moment, companies are faced with four different options:

They can decide to extend an employee’s furloughed leave.
They can arrange for an employee to return to work on reduced hours.
The employee returns to work on a full-time basis.
They can make the furloughed employee redundant.

Given the current situation, it is unfortunately the last of these points that many companies will choose to do. However, when doing so, they must be sure to respect all of the complex rules and regulations that govern redundancies.

Turning furloughed leave into a redundancy
Turning furloughed leave to redundancy is not the ideal outcome and is not what the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme was designed for. Nevertheless, the current situation has backed many employers into a corner. As a result, a significant number of those who have been furloughed will inevitably end up out of work and, while these may be unprecedented times, employment law continues to apply.

Therefore, it is important that employers follow the correct procedures when making an employee redundant, particularly as there is likely to be increased scrutiny of the way they handle the process.