Voluntary redundancy termination notice

Once you’ve completed your consultation procedure, which you still need to follow even in the case of any volunteers for redundancy, you must issue staff with a formal notice of termination of employment. In the case of voluntary redundancy, the notice will be slightly different to that issued to those who have been made compulsorily redundant.

Notice of redundancy

Employees who volunteer and are accepted for redundancy are still regarded in law as having been dismissed. This means they’re in more or less the same legal position as employees who are compulsorily made redundant and thus you still need to fully involve them in your fair redundancy consultation procedure. Once you’ve completed that, you then need to decide whether you are going to formally accept their application for voluntary redundancy. If you do, you must write advising them of this. Use our Voluntary Redundancy Termination Notice here. Whilst much of the content is the same as our standard Redundancy Termination Notice, there are a couple of different provisions. Firstly, obviously, it reflects the fact the employee has applied for voluntary redundancy and that their application has now been formally accepted.

Discretionary redundancy payment

The notice also provides for the possibility of the employee being paid a discretionary enhanced redundancy payment. In order to persuade employees to volunteer for redundancy, and hence limit the need for compulsory redundancies, many employers offer a discretionary enhancement to the basic statutory redundancy payment which is only available to volunteers who are accepted for redundancy. This is often outside the terms of any contractual redundancy payment scheme and indeed usually happens where there is no contractual scheme for the employer to rely on.  Related to this, additionally we’ve provided for the possibility of the employee being asked to sign a settlement agreement on voluntary redundancy. Some employers do this in order to take away the risk of an employment tribunal claim.

An employee has no statutory right to appeal against a redundancy dismissal. However, it’s normally advisable still to give the employee an opportunity to appeal as part of an overall fair procedure. That said, this is probably unnecessary in the case of a voluntary redundancy bearing in mind the employee has volunteered to be dismissed and therefore effectively consented to it. As such, we’ve not included this in the notice.