Question re redundancy following company merger

[Hassled]

The situation is:
Company A has bought out Company B. Both companies were working on very similar products, and post-merger it was decided to press on with Company B's product and abandon Company A's version. The Company A employees who were working on the abandoned product move on to work for the new product, but it becomes clear that there are too many people involved at this stage, i.e not enough work to go round. It's all very specialist so quite hard to move sideways within the company.

The Company B employees are presumably protected by TUPE, but do the Company A employees have any additional protection against redundancy in this scenario?

Many thanks.

I'm no expert but have been TUPE'd myself in the past. The protection that Company B employees get is around their length of service, and terms & conditions. So if Company B employees are made redundant, then their service whilst at Company B (as well as Company A) is taken into consideration for calculating redundancy pay. Likewise if Company B employees had better redundancy terms in their contract then they would need to be made redundant on those terms, rather than Company A's, even though they now work for Company A whose employees may be paid less in redundancy payments.

I don't believe they have any other special protection against redundancy, other than that, and I don't believe there is any protection for Company A employees in this situation, as their terms & conditions will not have changed.

But as I said, I'm not an expert, and I think the area is quite complex, so perhaps someone else will be able to offer advice.

Thanks for replying - you've confirmed what I pretty much thought. No one has actually used the R word yet but it's only a matter of time - a bloody nightmare.