Personal Injury

In this case all of the claimants were made redundant with no appropriate consultation with employee representatives prior to them being made redundant. Pursing a Protective Award Claim Employees are entitled to pursue a claim for a protective award if 20 or more employees are made redundant from one establishment and their employer does not follow a statutory consultation process before making them redundant. The claim was initially defended by the administrators on the basis that not all of Onto Holdings offices/locations made 20 or more employees redundant, even if the total number of employees made redundant by Onto across all locations substantially exceeded 20.

“The administrators, Teneo Financial Advisory, attempted to defend the claim on grounds that were contrary to the way in which Onto Holdings Limited had dealt with a previous collective redundancy exercise, where all locations were aggregated together for the purposes of collective redundancy consultation. I submitted a substantial amount of evidence and was able to persuade the Employment Tribunal that all of our clients, wherever they were employed, were part of the same establishment as Onto Holdings operated as one business regardless of where employees actually performed their work. ” “I was of the view that the administrators had acted opportunistically in trying to frustrate my clients’ protective award claims and the Judge had some sympathy with my view,” added Alan.

Collective Redundancy Consultation If employers have not followed the correct procedures when making staff redundant then their employees can claim a little known financial claim known as a Protective Award, as was the case here. It’s compensation of up to 90 days’ gross pay, which can be awarded by an Employment Tribunal when an employer fails to collectively inform and consult its workforce of twenty or more employees from the same establishment that they have been dismissed on the grounds of redundancy.

Employees do not need to have been employed for any minimum length of service to qualify for such an award and quite often employees obtain more compensation by way of a protective award than, for example, statutory redundancy or notice pay, which are completely separate claims. “Thankfully, the line of defence used by the administrators will soon be assigned to the scrapheap, as the government intends to pass legislation to enable all employees of an insolvent business to pursue protective award claims, regardless of the number of employees made redundant at the workplace where they worked, provided that overall 20 or more employees are made redundant,” added Alan Lewis.