How Accepting an Alternative to Redundancy Affects your Rights

When you are made redundant, the law protects you to some extent. Your employer is required to handle the redundancy in certain ways, and, in most cases, to give you a redundancy payment when your employment ends. The law also obligates your employer to consider alternatives to terminating your employment outright. What those alternatives are is explored in more depth elsewhere on the site. Here, we will focus on how your reaction to any alternatives offered may affect the benefits you would otherwise have gained from the redundancy.

Being Offered Another Job

Often, as an alternative to redundancy, you will be offered another job at the same company. The offer must be made before you leave the company, and the new job must begin within 4 weeks of the old job ending.

You should consider any alternative job offer carefully. If you reject it without good reason, the employer can refuse to offer you a redundancy payment.

If you’re not sure about whether the offered job is suitable, you can try it out. The law requires that the employer allow you to do the job for a minimum of 4 weeks on a trial basis, so you can decide for yourself whether it is a suitable alternative to the one you had before. A longer trial period can also be negotiated. If, after trying it out, you decide that the new job is not acceptable, you can leave and still claim that you have been made redundant, and are therefore entitled to a payment.

Deciding Whether an Alternative Job Offer is Acceptable

The alternative job offer should be “the same, or substantially the same” as the one you did before. Disputes, which ultimately will be heard at Employment Tribunals, tend to hinge on what “substantially” means in this context. Reductions in pay, significantly less favourable terms and conditions of employment, or additional travelling time to reach the workplace, would all normally be considered valid reasons for rejecting a job offer.

It’s also worth noting that, although the legislation does not state it specifically, experience has demonstrated that the employment tribunals will also take subjective factors into account. This point is best illustrated with some examples. Let’s say you were offered another job at the same rate of pay, but you felt the new job was less prestigious than the one you had before. That could be sufficient grounds for rejecting it. Or to illustrate the subjectivity aspect with a slightly exaggerated example : Let’s say you were offered another identical job in another town which was just as easy for you to reach as the one where you worked before, but you didn’t want to work in it because you had once been mugged there and now had an irrational fear of entering it. That, too, could well be accepted by the Employment Tribunal as a valid reason for rejecting the job offer.

Note that sometimes alternative job offers are accompanied by promises that, should business conditions later change in such a way that the original job needs to be done again, you will either get it or be given priority consideration for it.

Lay-offs and Short-Time Working

Workers are laid off when, on a temporary basis, they are not given work by their employers. Short-time working occurs when the worker is employed for less than half of the usual work week. Sometimes these options are offered as alternatives to redundancy. When either situation persists for more than 4 weeks, or for 6 weeks within a 13-week period, the worker is entitled to claim a redundancy payment and should do so in writing.

Conclusion – Alternatives to Redundancy

As you can see, accepting an alternative to redundancy doesn’t necessarily mean that your redundancy rights are wholly negated. It’s important to understand how they will be affected, however, when considering the alternative offer.

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