Many HR professionals will be familiar with the redundancy protections that workers on maternity leave have under Regulation 10 of The Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999 (Regulation 10). Similar protections apply during adoption leave and shared parental leave. Those protections are important, but they have often been difficult to interpret and apply in practice.
Earlier this year, those protections were extended to include pregnant workers as well as to cover an 18-month period from birth or the date of placement for adoption. This article looks at the extended protections and how you need to adapt your redundancy processes to give effect to them.
The previous Regulation 10 protection applied in circumstances when, during an employee’s ordinary or additional maternity leave period, it was not practicable by reason of redundancy for their employer to continue to employ them under their existing contract of employment.
In that situation, the employee was entitled to be offered a suitable alternative vacancy where available. Importantly, if that vacancy could be suitable for more than one affected employee, it would need to be offered to the employee on maternity leave before being offered to anyone else.
A failure to comply with Regulation 10 would result in the affected employee being able to bring an automatic unfair dismissal claim.
One of the issues with how the protection used to work in practice before the recent changes was timing. For...
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