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In the last issue we looked at the employer's obligations to consult in a redundancy situation. In this the second part of the article we focus on the task of identifying the appropriate pool of employees and the issue of what selection
The "pool"
The first stage for the employer in carrying out a redundancy exercise is to identify the "pool" of employees from which the candidates will be selected. If the wrong pool is selected, any resulting dismissal may be unfair even if fair selection criteria are used and properly applied.
When considering what is the appropriate pool the following factors should be taken into account:
* the type of work that the employees in the group are carrying out;
* whether other groups of employees are doing similar work;
* whether any of the jobs can be interchangeable; and
* whether any agreed procedure should be followed.
If these factors are ignored the employee dismissed for redundancy may bring a claim for unfair dismissal on the grounds that had the selection criteria been applied more widely he or she would not have been selected for redundancy. For example in the case of Steel Stockholders (Birmingham) Ltd v Kirkwood 1993 the Employment Appeal Tribunal found that the dismissal was unfair when the employers "had created an artificially narrow pool from which to select employees for redundancy". This in effect had deprived Mr Kirkwood of the opportunity of being compared against the whole range of employees who were genuinely involved in...