In a landmark ruling, the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) has ruled that the words “at one establishment” in S.188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (TULRCA), which comprises the duty to consult collectively in large scale redundancies, should be deleted.

This greatly extends the scope of the duty on employers under S.188 to consult in relation to collective redundancies by reversing the previous position which enabled employers to treat separate sites as separate establishments. This means that by separating out redundancy processes at different establishments, employers could sometimes keep the numbers affected below the statutory threshold required to collectively consult over a 30 or 90 (recently reduced to 45) day period.

Click here to read more The EAT case. For more information, please contact a member of the Devonshires’ Employment team.