Is there a right to be accompanied?

All good redundancy procedures allow an at-risk employee to be accompanied to a redundancy consultation meeting by a union rep or co-worker and to re-schedule the meeting to another reasonable date if the rep is not available. However, there is no statutory right to be accompanied to a redundancy consultation meeting. This is because the statutory right, found in section 10, Employment Relations Act 1999, is only triggered in the case of meetings concerning disciplinary and grievance issues and not redundancy consultation meetings (Heathmill Multimedia ASP Limited v Jones [2003] IRLR 856).

Although there is no right to be accompanied to the redundancy consultation meeting itself, any meeting to discuss an individual grievance about the redundancy consultation will trigger the right to be accompanied. This would include grievances about, for example, non-payment of statutory or contractual redundancy pay, or discriminatory selection practices.