Provisional non-selection for redundancy letter

Once you’ve provisionally selected employees for redundancy from within your selection pool and notified them of this, you should also notify those who were in the pool that haven’t been provisionally selected.

Provisional selection for redundancy

As part of ensuring a fair redundancy procedure, you must carry out consultation with individual employees (and you may also need to carry out collective consultation with trade union or employee reps depending on the number of redundancies proposed). Once you’ve decided on your selection pool and put together your proposed objective criteria for fairly selecting employees for compulsory redundancy, at an early stage in your consultation process you should ideally consult with your staff on those proposed criteria - see our First Redundancy Consultation Letter. Assuming you’ve completed that stage though and you’ve also fairly marked all the employees in the pool against your selection criteria, you’ll then need to advise them of who has and hasn’t been provisionally selected for redundancy. To minimise the risk of subjectivity, do try to ensure that the scoring exercise is carried out separately by at least two managers. If an employee has been provisionally selected for redundancy, use our Second Redundancy Consultation Letter and then continue to fully consult with those employees. Our Provisional Non-Selection for Redundancy Letter is intended to be sent to those employees in the selection pool who haven’t been provisionally selected.

Letter contents

Our letter outlines the selection criteria that were applied to those in the selection pool and then it advises the employee that their total overall score in the selection assessment means they’ve not been provisionally selected for redundancy. You won’t need to continue consulting with the non-selected employees given that you’re no longer proposing to make them redundant. Our letter also gives you the option to provide the employee with a copy of their completed redundancy selection assessment which will contain their own individual scores. You don’t have to provide this given that the employee hasn’t been provisionally selected, as they’re not going to challenge their non-selection. However, as there’s a possibility that the redundancy situation could later change and the employee then becomes provisionally selected, it’s advisable to be as open and transparent as possible at this stage. Don’t share the overall final scores of other employees though as that’s their personal data, unless you can sufficiently anonymise it. Finally, our letter goes on to emphasise to the employee that the decision not to select them is only a provisional one as no final decisions on redundancy have been taken yet, and it ends with a warning that you may need to contact them again if, as a result of consultation with the provisionally selected employees, their scores need to be amended and this results in a change to the overall scoring order for provisional selection. It’s not unknown for that to happen. Once final decisions on redundancy have been taken, if the employee isn’t to be made redundant, you can use our Letter Confirming Employee Not Redundant to confirm that.