Notification of appeal meeting

You’re under no legal obligation to give a short-serving employee an opportunity to appeal against their dismissal, unless you’ve promised this as part of a relevant contractual procedure. If you do decide to allow the employee to appeal and they exercise this right, use our letter to inform them of the date and time of the appeal meeting.

On appeal

If an employee who does not have sufficient continuity of service to claim unfair dismissal (two years or more) appeals against their dismissal in circumstances where you have granted them a right of appeal (whether that dismissal was on the grounds of capability, conduct or redundancy), you will need to arrange an appeal meeting to hear the appeal. After it, you will need to inform them of your final decision. Use our Notification of Appeal Meeting to set up the date and time of the meeting.

The appeal meeting

If the employee does appeal, someone other than you should consider the facts to see if they agree with the dismissal decision reached. The person who chairs the appeal meeting should preferably be more senior than the original decision maker and also they should not have been previously involved in the decision to dismiss the employee. In small organisations where it’s just not possible to have a different manager hear the appeal, the person dealing with the appeal should act as impartially as possible.