Redundancy threatened.then suspended

Hi there,

Am, new to this site, but from looking at the forum, looks a good place to come for advice.

My friend is an electrician and was suspended on full pay yesterday pending investigation.

All the vans are fitted with trackers, and the firm are now saying that my friend has charged extra hours than the tracker would suggest he worked.
He fills in a weekly timesheet and has never claimed hours fraudulently. He is of course worried, that if he has made any mistakes on timesheets, this will be used against him.

This might ordinarily be fairly straight forward, except for the fact that all staff on the firm were called into a meeting last week and warned that redundancies were imminent unless work picked up.

So this looks as if its an easy way of getting rid of staff without paying redundancy. Can they sensibly dismiss staff if, a few days earlier they had warned of redundancies?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Twrichie

Dear Twrichie

There are two issues here that are separate.

If you friend is being called to a disciplinary investigation meeting regarding falsification of his timesheets, then that is not redundancy and at that meeting they will investigate the matter and he will be able to put forward his case and be able to request the timesheets to see if he made a genuine mistake or not.

As to redundancy, this investigation hearing cannot be classed as disciplinary action against which any selection process using disciplinary as a assessment scoring criteria cannot be used until there is a disciplinary hearing held and he is found guilty of gross or serious misconduct.

As to your final question, yes, the Company can continue to hold disciplinary meetings whether formal or investigatory even though they have made staff aware that there may be redundancies.

I would advise your friend to visit the Acas and BERR websites for details on both disciplinary and redundancy processes.

Hope this helps

Carol