On Maternity leave and been put on consoltation

Hi,

I am currently on maternity leave and have received a letter from my employer to say that my job is "at risk" they have asked me to arrange a meeting to meet with them to discuss. The reason they are giving is that they are expecting my responsibilites to cease due to re-org. i have arranged a meeting and seen them, but they can't answer any questions and have been told to carry on waiting as my manager is still trying to fight the cause to keep our jobs.
In the mean time...I have a lady who is covering my role, she has been told to carry on, how should she not also be on some sort of consoltation?
Its possible that they are re-locating our jobs to the head office in the US - do they have to offer re-location packages?
Please can you help as i'm not sure where i stand with all of this, my gut feeling is that they want out with all the old staff (company not been doing very well) and employe new staff (at some point). I was also told it was a "sales" dicision to look at the admin staff, not all admin staff (of whats left) have been out on consoltation. the one remaining employee is the newest memember of staff, employeed around 2 months ago to replace a part time member of staff (which again is another stroy)
Can you advise on this and whether any of this sounds a litte off to you?
Thanks
M.

I think you can entirely forget a re-location package to the US for an admin worker - no chance

Regardless of your gut feeling, they are acting correctly in consulting, and they may not be able to answer all your questions yet, especially if there is still a debate going on about the decision. This is right and proper - it's the way it should be done. The job is yours - not your maternity covers - so she wouldn't be consulted about it. It certainly isn't impossible that you may be right about what is going on, but provided that there are definitely redundancies in law now, if at some later stage the business needs to recruit new staff again, then they can. Alternatively, during a re-organisation, they may recruit for new staff to do jobs that existing staff cannot do - and it may be fair providing they can prove that.

It's a little too low on detail (which I appreciate you don't have at the moment) to be able to advise - I would suggest that they haven't yet done anything wrong, but it would be worth checking up on your rights - especially as maternity leave gives you additional ones. ACAS website and direct.gov both have a lot of information to start you off.