Termination without notice clause

Our clause sets out the circumstances in which you can terminate an employee’s employment contract immediately without notice or pay in lieu.

Notice rights

Our Termination Without Notice Clause sets out various circumstances in which you reserve the right to terminate the employee’s employment without notice, and it goes beyond just gross misconduct or gross negligence. For example, it includes where the employee is convicted of a criminal offence (other than a minor road traffic offence), has brought the business into disrepute, no longer has the right to work in the UK or has committed any serious or repeated breach of their employment contract. However, when exercising your right to terminate under a clause such as ours, you’ll need to carefully consider whether your employee is nevertheless entitled to statutory minimum notice. Whilst notice wouldn’t apply in cases of gross misconduct or gross negligence, it may well apply to other dismissal reasons. You can’t contract out of the minimum statutory notice period where it applies. The legislation says that the right to statutory minimum notice doesn’t affect your right to treat the employment contract “as terminable without notice by reason of the conduct of the other party”, i.e. your termination grounds should relate to matters of repudiatory “conduct”, otherwise statutory minimum notice may have to be paid.

Unfair dismissal

You also can’t contract out of an employee’s unfair dismissal rights through a clause in the employment contract. So, if the employee has the right to claim unfair dismissal, our clause won’t prevent them being able to bring a claim if you don’t have a potentially fair reason for dismissal or you haven’t followed a fair procedure in implementing the dismissal or, if you do have a fair reason for dismissal, you’ve failed to act reasonably in treating that reason as a sufficient one for dismissing the employee. Therefore, this type of clause is only usually seen in the employment contracts of senior executives or directors, where you may well enter into a Settlement Agreement to terminate their employment on agreed terms. In any event, cases where you will rely on our clause should be rare.