Can your employer retrospectively target you?

[JonahPlusWhale]

My sisters employer are in financial difficulty and have written to all employees setting out new targets/KPIs which they were told were purely for financial support/bonuses and would be coming into effect from March 2019.

The employer has since then written to only some of the employees who haven't met these new targets (which are ridiculously unachievable and also contradictory of one another) and have now said that the employees are in breach of contract and quoted a clause in the contract which says that "the employee will upkeep high levels of service standards as reasonably set out by the employer" which is evidenced by the below.. and then below detailed the employees figures from May 2018-March 2019 which have been measured against these new targets so they are saying that the targets haven't been met in the last almost year and so the employees are in breach of contract purely due to that.

Am I wrong in thinking you can't set new targets with a commencement date of March 2019 and then use them retrospectively to measure performance over the last year since May 2018 in order to try to terminate someone's contract?

Also, if 10 employees all didn't meet the targets over what ever time period but these letters have only been sent to a select few Is that not unfair?

Thank you in advance!

Assuming these members of staff have at least two years’ service and are in the UK, then dismissing them for this reason would be unfair dismissal.

3 or 4 years service each and yes in the U.K.
Thank you!

Presumably they are trying to avoid having to pay redundancy money. It is of course possible to dismiss someone who is not performing but retrospectively applying KPIs wouldn’t be a fair way of doing it.

Yes they're definitely trying to cut costs in every way they can and also get rid of people as quickly as they can to avoid further costs of wages..etc. Wankers!

Well they’ll end up spending the money on solicitors instead if they’re not careful!