Ending of fixed-term contracts 




On 6 April 2013, the law changed, limiting employers’ duty to consult collectively on the expiry and non-renewal of fixed-term contracts. As a result, dismissals that result from the expiry and non-renewal of fixed-term contracts are now ignored when calculating whether 20 or more redundancy dismissals have been proposed in a 90-day period. 




The ending and non-renewal of a fixed-term contract will only count as a dismissal for the purposes of meeting the 20-employee threshold if the employer proposes to end the contract prematurely, in other words, before its expiry date, for a reason related to redundancy (that is, a reason unrelated to the individual). This might be, for example, a cut in funding or the premature ending of a project. 




This change to the law was made to overturn an important victory by the higher education union UCU in Lancaster University v UCU [2010] UKEAT/0278/10/2710, in which the union won a substantial protective award for members due to the university’s failure to consult collectively over the non-renewal of fixed-term contracts. A report by the UCU in 2016 describes how fixed-term contracts have become the “norm” for early career academics in higher education. Seventy-six per cent of all teaching and research assistants are on insecure contracts.