Collective consultation and redundancy under the Employment Rights Act

Written By Halborns Employment Law Experts

6th October 2026

Home » Resources » Collective consultation and redundancy under the Employment Rights Act

Redundancy is demanding for everyone involved, operationally for the teams running it and personally for the people affected. But there is now an additional test: whether you could defend every decision to someone who has had months to prepare and uses AI to help them do it.

Since April 2026, a failure to meet collective consultation obligations can result in a protective award of up to 180 days’ gross pay per affected employee, double the previous maximum. From 1 October 2026, employees also have six months rather than three to bring most tribunal claims, so your decisions and records need to hold up for longer. And from 1 January 2027, employees will need only six months’ service to bring an unfair dismissal claim, and the cap on compensation will be removed. All three changes land while demand for redundancy is rising.

Acas research suggests one in three employers are likely to make redundancies by January 2027, and 168,453 potential redundancies were notified through HR1 submissions in the first half of 2026, up 9.4% on the same period last year.

Why redundancy is harder to defend than it was a year ago

As Empowering People Group CEO Rena Christou wrote in The AI Journal and The Times, employees are increasingly using AI to draft tribunal claims and build their legal knowledge. That also means they can use it to draft consultation questions, test your rationale and challenge selection scoring

As a result, meeting records, criteria and business cases get read closely, and inconsistencies surface quickly, weakening employers’ defence if a case does go to tribunal.

A process that was once judged mainly on whether the steps were followed is now judged on whether the reasoning holds up, and on whether you can show it did at every stage.

Do you need collective consultation?

It comes down to three interlinked questions: could 20 or more employees be dismissed, within a 90-day period, at one establishment? If the answer to all three is yes, collective consultation could apply.

Whether people are assigned to one establishment is fact-sensitive, so if the proposal spans several sites, departments or group companies, get advice before you conclude it doesn’t.

Even when collective consultation doesn’t apply you still need a fair individual process, and where it does apply it doesn’t replace individual consultation, so you will usually need both.

Where collective consultation goes wrong

Collective consultation tends to run into trouble in four areas.

The first is timing. Once a proposal exists, starting consultation late squeezes the whole project plan and raises the risk of non-compliance, and elections for employee representatives can add more time if you have no recognised body.

The HR1 notification sits in the same category, and a missed or late filing can expose the organisation and its directors to criminal and financial consequences, however well the consultation itself is run.

The second is evidence. If your rationale, scoring and meeting records are thin or inconsistent, you have little to show that decisions were fair and evidence-based, and AI has made those gaps much easier for the other side to find. Good records are also what make a claim quicker and cheaper to defend.

The third is whether the consultation is genuine. Treating it as a tick-box exercise is riskier now that representatives can arrive with well-formed questions and alternatives.

You need to explain the business rationale, consider feedback properly and be able to show how it shaped the final decision. Leaving redeployment until the end is a version of the same mistake.

Suitable alternative employment should be explored throughout, which can mean fewer dismissals, retained skills and better relationships with the people you are consulting.

The fourth is what happens to people afterwards. Leaving employees without practical support for their next move raises the risk of difficult exits and reputational damage, and it affects the morale and confidence of those who stay.

Plan the process before you start it

To help with the planning stage, we’ve built a Collective consultation roadmap. It sets out an illustrative 48-day timeline across preparation, consultation and implementation, along with a decision guide for whether collective consultation applies and the pitfalls above.

The aim is to let you test your project plan against a realistic sequence before you commit, particularly the time needed to consult meaningfully and document how alternatives and selection decisions were considered.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can enquire about our Collective consultation toolkit here. A compliant collective process typically involves 80+ tasks and a large volume of templates and legal documents, and our Collective consultation toolkit and employment lawyers are there if you want that structure and support in place.