Continuous service & Appointed role

hi,

I am in the process of being made redundant and I have two key questions:

1. Continuous service: I have been a permanent employee for 7 years, however prior to this I was a contractor going through a recruitment agency and a limited company for over 2 years. As a contractor I was bound by IR35 as I was treated exactly the same as a standard employee, the nature of my employment was as if I was a permanent employee (most people didnt know I was a contractor). I had no breaks of service when contracting and joining permanently. My question is:

- Can my continuous service begin from the time I started working at my company.


2. In our team of 8 we were all told of our redundancy, and assumed we were all going. However a new job was created and was assigned to one of our team, without interview or consultation. I am more than qualified to do this role, and in some of the criteria have more experience than the person who was chosen. So my question is

- Do I have any rights to appeal?


Many thanks

1. You can certainly argue that the nature of your relationship at that point meant you were employed and therefore entitled to full employment rights, meaning you should be entitled to have that service counted when calculating continuous service. The fact that you are an employee now means that your employer might find it difficult to argue that the relationship altered at the point you became a permanent member of staff. Do you know they are definitely not planning to include your time contracting in their calculations?

2. You can certainly appeal your redundancy if you feel you were unfairly selected. If there was one role available for a team of 8 whose jobs are redundant, your employer should have conducted some kind of selection process to decide who goes and who stays, so any failure to do that can be challenged. You do need to think about what you might gain though. If you can clearly demonstrate that by any reasonable criteria you should have been offered that job, then you have a financial loss. If not, given it was 8 for 1 job, it might be difficult to argue that their failure to demonstrate a transparent selection process has resulted in any actual financial loss for you.

Understanding motives always helps. Why do you think they selected this other person instead of you?

Many thanks for your response - very much appreciated.

1. I can confirm that they are definately not including my contracting time in my redundancy payoff. The response that HR gave me was that I was contracting through a limited company and thus not an employee of the company.

2. The criteria for the job I clearly matched. There are 2 reasons for chosing the other candidate that I can see.

a. We have 2 grading systems a pay grade and a title grade. Whilst my pay grade is higher than theirs, they have a title grade higher than mine (historical reasons different teams and previous restructures). However, we are all in the same team doing the same role, with a total flat structure within the team.
b. The other candidate had a close working relationship with the person who made the decision.

I have been advised that we will be having access to a solicitor up to a specific value, so I think I will be using this service! Many thanks again for your time.

further to the point 2. We were specifically told that jobs that become available that are of a higher title grade than you are currently - you are welcome to apply for and wont be discriminated against based on grade.