Facing redundancy shortly before maternity leave

[MarianneM]

Can anyone advise me on this? I am 23 weeks pregnant and have told my line manager and given the start date of my maternity leave as 6th July, just over a week before my due date. I am employed by a university and all staff were told last month that there would be redundancies this year. The people who will be made redundant will be told within the next two weeks. I am increasingly convinced I will be one of them.

I learned today of the Regulation 10 of the Maternity and Parental Regulations 1999 which appears to state that during maternity leave I have to be offered a suitable job if I am made redundant.

What I would like to know is if I bring the start date of my maternity leave forward to the earliest I can (last week of April), can they then make me redundant as they have to give me at least five weeks' notice I think, and it is five weeks on Monday until the last week of April when I could start my maternity leave if I brought it forward. So if I tell them that I want to start my mat leave on 26/04 and they then give me notice of redundancy, am I covered by the Regulation 10 as I won't actually be made redundant until my maternity leave has already started.

Sorry, this is a long and incoherent post, hope it makes some kind of sense.

If you are on maternity leave at the point your redundancy is effective, then you are covered by Reg 10. But that doesn't mean they can't make you redundant. It means that if your position is redundant and there is a suitable position available, you must be offered it.

So it will depend on whether there is a job available, and what counts as a suitable available vacancy also could depend on the basis on which you would be selected for redundancy. Is it a restructuring, what exactly will be happening to your job? How are they selecting people?

As Flowery said, Reg 10 doesn't completely outlaw redundancy.

I would be pretty careful personally. Firstly because, in my limited experience, academic redundancies in universities very rarely throw up vacancies (because people are so specialised) and they are so slow to make redundancies that there are rarely vacancies to offset redundancies in other areas either. You could therefore find that you go on maternity leave very early and get made redundant anyway. Secondly because, if you start maternity leave that early, there is a good chance that you will have to go back to work long before you want to - either because your year has run out (ie at about 9 months' old for your baby, particularly if it's late) or because the pay has run out...