Why consultation is a legal requirement
Redundancy consultation isn't a courtesy, it's a legal requirement. The purpose is to give you a genuine opportunity to: understand why your role is at risk, challenge the selection criteria if you're in a pool, suggest alternatives to redundancy (reduced hours, redeployment, voluntary redundancy), and ask questions about the process and the package. An employer who has already decided to make you redundant before consulting you, or who treats the consultation as a box-ticking exercise, may be acting unlawfully, and that could give you grounds to challenge the process.
Collective vs individual consultation
There are two different consultation regimes depending on how many redundancies are being made.
If your employer is making 20 or more redundancies at one establishment within 90 days, they must follow a collective consultation process. This includes notifying the government (via a HR1 form), consulting with elected employee representatives or a recognised trade union, and allowing a minimum period of 30 days (for 20–99 redundancies) or 45 days (for 100 or more) before the first dismissal can take effect.
For individual redundancies (fewer than 20 people), there's no set minimum period, but the consultation must still be meaningful, not a single brief meeting followed immediately by a letter.
What meaningful individual consultation looks like
There's no magic number of meetings, but an employment tribunal will expect to see: at least one meeting at which you were told your role was at risk and given the chance to respond, a genuine consideration of any alternatives you raised, time to prepare your response, the right to be accompanied by a trade union representative or a workplace colleague, and a second meeting before the final decision is made. If your employer held a single meeting and handed you a redundancy letter the same day, that's a very short consultation and worth questioning.
The right to be accompanied
At any formal redundancy consultation meeting you have the statutory right to be accompanied by either a trade union official or a workplace colleague. This person can address the meeting and confer with you during it, but they cannot answer questions on your behalf. If your employer refuses to allow you to bring a companion to a formal meeting, that's a breach of your statutory rights. Many people don't exercise this right but it's worth knowing, having someone else in the room creates a witness and can make the process feel less intimidating.
Alternatives to redundancy
Before making anyone redundant, your employer is legally expected to consider alternatives. These might include: reducing everyone's hours (short-time working), a temporary pay cut, voluntary redundancy (where people self-select), redeployment to a different role within the organisation, or a recruitment freeze. If suitable alternative employment exists within the organisation, your employer must offer it to you, even if it's in a different department or at a slightly lower level. If they don't, that can affect the fairness of the dismissal. If a suitable alternative is offered and you unreasonably refuse it, you could lose your entitlement to statutory redundancy pay.
If consultation has been inadequate
If your employer has failed to consult properly, or at all, you may have a claim for unfair dismissal or, in collective redundancy cases, a protective award (up to 90 days' gross pay per affected employee). The deadline for making a claim is usually three months minus one day from your dismissal date, so act quickly. Before going to tribunal, you'll typically need to go through ACAS Early Conciliation first. If you think your consultation process was rushed or superficial, speak to an employment solicitor, many will give you a free initial assessment of your situation.