Redundancy consultation - help please!

[Custardapples]

My employer is making a huge number of redundancies (cutting workforce in half). They have launched the statutory consultation but some things are baffling us. They have not given reasons for particular redundancies only for a general reduction (which are not financial but strategic reasons, they say). So, person A might be keeping their job but person B who does a lot of similar things has been made redundant and there is no rationale as to why B is redundant but not A or vice versa.

Secondly they have said we can offer counterproposals but can’t challenge overall numbers of staff. So we can’t say ‘if we do x we can save this much which will mean that we can retain person B’. The number of people in the new structure is fixed.

Are they allowed to do this? It feels like this can’t be a meaningful consultation (which Acas say is required) without knowing why particular posts are being made redundant and without being able to suggest cost savings that could prevent redundancies (even if these are subsequently rejected).

You are looking at it from the perspective of job role / work being done. It sounds like they are looking at if from the perspective of only having enough money to pay a certain number of people.

They definitely can do this. I would look up their accounts on companies house, but if they are going this route due to funding, you may not want to cling to the lifeboat of a sinking ship. The next round may not be as generous in terms of payout.

Leaving aside that they’ve said it’s not for financial reasons what I’m trying to get at is what are their legal duties regarding a meaningful consultation?

Can they say: we’re running a consultation because the law requires us to but you can’t propose that certain jobs be kept, you can’t challenge the relocation of a role, you can’t dispute someone being made redundant when someone else who does the same job was not, etc.?

Is the consultation purely performative legally speaking? Acas gives the impression it shouldn’t be.

To my understanding they should be phrasing it as ‘we are making job X redundant but able to save job Y’ not ‘ person A for person B’

So it’s things like them removing a core function (e.g. the role that processes invoices) and then we ask ‘how will we pay for things?’ And ‘why has this role gone?’ And there is no answer.
It feels very difficult to respond to a consultation with incomplete information. Are they going to outsource this? Add it into someone else’s job? Never buy anything again? What’s the plan?

I've been through a few redundancies. You can ask any questions you like but they don't have to answer them or share their plan of how work is going to be done afterwards. You may find that those who remain will have work added to their roles so check your job descriptions carefully if you are staying.
You can make suggestions for how redundancies can be avoided or reduced, like combining roles, some people going part time, job shares etc. You can request things like training and career coaching for the people leaving to help them find alternative work. And the rules are slightly different if there's 20 or more people redundant at the same time.

As someone who has had to manage redundancy processes, they should give you a rationale as to why certain posts have been selected for redundancy and not others. Has this not been presented?

No it hasn’t and this is what we’re all struggling with.
This is a big process with hundreds of redundancies. I understand they don’t have to explain anything but are they open to legal challenge if they don’t do certain things?

Union are involved and we are waiting for advice which may clarify but have very limited time to act.

Should we involve Acas? How do you do that?

They have explicitly said that we can’t make a suggestion that would involve someone who is earmarked for redundancy keeping their job even if we could show the savings to cover it, if them keeping their job increases the number of staff in the organisation from the plan.

This is the weirdest part. They are basically saying if we can show we can employ 9 people for the cost of 8 they won’t consider it because they’ve decided on principle that 8 is a good number of people to employ.

And job descriptions have all been rewritten to be super generic so it’s hard to see what each role actually covers. Which is just silly.

It’s actually been a fantastic place to work up until now. Exceeding targets. Good staff morale. It’s all so odd.

Are they about to be bought out by a another company or merging? Maybe this would explain it?

The other company has an invoice processing section.