Unfair dismissal law — some key points to note

• The right to claim unfair dismissal is only available to employees (see Chapter 2).

• Most claims for unfair dismissal require continuous employment. On 6 April 2012, this was increased from one year to two years for all employees who started work on or after that date.

• Some types of dismissal are automatically unfair. If a dismissal was carried out for an automatically unfair reason, the employer is not allowed to argue that dismissing for that reason was reasonable. Nearly (but not quite) all automatically unfair dismissals have no service requirement.