Work want me to increase hours to full time but I don’t want to

[Floopyandtired]

I am currently on mat leave and due back at work in June next year. I have DS1 who is nearly 4 and DS2 who is 11 weeks old.

I work for a small business in the private sector as a manager of a small team of 6. I used to work full time hours but after DS1 was born I returned 4 days a week working 28hpw in total. Our area of business is expanding rapidly and since I’ve been on mat leave the team I manage has doubled in size. I was invited into a team catch up chat thing via Teams today and thought it’d be nice to see my workmates and chat for an hour, so I attended. After the end of the catch up my boss asked me to stay on the call and pretty much said that due to the rapid growth of the team I will need to return to work full time after my mat leave finishes or, quite, “it just isn’t going to work.” I was very flustered and didn’t really know what to say. I said I hadn’t given work a second thought since DS2 was born and could we discuss it closer to my return date.

Now I’m worrying that I’ll have to either return to work full time or I will somehow be managed out of the business. I neither want to return full time, nor can we afford full time childcare/wrap around care when DS1 starts school.

I’m lost as to where I stand legally here and would welcome some advice. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you in advance.

Flowery is correct. This is absolutely not a redundancy situation. Those on this thread who say it is are wrong. The courts have made it quite clear that replacing a part time role with a full time one is not a redundancy. They could, of course, sack you and recruit someone else to do the job full time but that would potentially be an unfair dismissal and discrimination.

I agree with Flowery as to your next steps.

@JaggedNail

I was in this situation, I was basically told my part time job was redundant and I'd either have to go full time or would be made redundant.

I got excellent help from a charity called Working Families who have a free helpline. I can't remember exactly how "we" won, but I wasn't made redundant and I kept the PT job for another 6 years until I was ready to increase my hours.

You won because your job was not redundant. Redundancy means a decreased need, in your case there was an increased need, therefore it was not redundancy.

I'm sure Aprilx, but I didn't know that until I spoke to the charity and actually, my Union were no help at all.