What the 20-employee threshold covers, the 30 and 45-day minimum periods, the HR1 notice almost nobody has heard of, and why the penalty for getting it wrong doubled this year.
A restructuring review lands on a number: 24 people at one warehouse are no longer needed once the new system goes live. The instinct is to tell them quickly, start notice periods and move on. The law requires something to happen first — a minimum period of consultation before a single dismissal takes effect, and a notice to a government body most employers have never dealt with.
That duty is triggered by headcount, and it runs on a timetable measured in weeks before the first dismissal takes effect.
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Section 188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 sets the trigger: an employer proposing to dismiss 20 or more employees as redundant at one establishment within a period of 90 days or less has to consult collectively before any of those dismissals take effect. Below 20, each employee is still owed a fair individual process — warning, consultation, a genuine look at alternatives — but the rest of this page, the fixed timetable, the elected representatives and the government notice, does not apply.
"One establishment" matters for any business with more than one site, and the answer is not what most owners assume. The Court of Justice of the European Union settled it in USDAW v WW Realisation 1 Ltd, known as the Woolworths case (C-80/14, 2015): establishment means the specific unit an employee is assigned to work in. The count is taken within that unit alone, never built by adding redundancies across every site the employer runs. A retail group closing twelve shops of under 20 staff each does not cross the threshold at any one of them, even though well over 100 people lose their jobs in total. One office or depot making 20 or more of its own staff redundant crosses it on its own, whatever the group employs elsewhere.
Where the proposal covers 20 to 99 redundancies, consultation has to run for at least 30 days before the first dismissal takes effect. Where it covers 100 or more, that rises to 45 days. Both figures count backward from the date the first dismissal is due to happen. A business working toward a closure date has to subtract 30 or 45 days from that date to find the last day consultation can start, regardless of when letters are actually sent or when the decision was made internally.
Those numbers are a floor. The law requires consultation to begin "in good time" and to cover three things in substance: ways of avoiding the dismissals, ways of reducing how many people are dismissed, and ways of softening the effect on anyone who is. A process that clears 30 days on the calendar with nothing of substance discussed in that time is still open to a finding that the duty was not properly met, because the length of the period and the quality of what happened inside it are judged separately.
A logistics company decides to close one depot and make 24 of its 24 staff there redundant, with no redundancies proposed anywhere else. No union is recognised at the depot. Before any at-risk letter goes out, the staff elect three representatives from among themselves. Consultation opens the same week, running to at least 30 days before the planned closure date, and the HR1 notice goes to the Redundancy Payments Service on the same day consultation starts. Alternatives are discussed and minuted at each meeting — redeployment to a second site, reduced hours, voluntary redundancy first — before any dismissal notice is confirmed. The 30 days and the HR1 timing run in parallel, so neither extends the process beyond what the numbers already require on their own.
Alongside employee consultation, section 193 of the 1992 Act requires the employer to notify the Secretary of State on the prescribed form, HR1, through the Insolvency Service's Redundancy Payments Service. The same 30 or 45-day minimum applies to this notice as applies to consultation itself, counted back from the date the first dismissal takes effect, and it is a separate legal duty from consulting the staff — meeting one does not meet the other. Many small and medium employers who have never made collective redundancies before do not know this form exists until well into the process.
Failing to send HR1 in time is a criminal offence under section 194, carrying a fine with no upper limit, because the fine is set at level 5 on the standard scale and that scale has carried no statutory ceiling since 2015. The offence applies to the company and, depending on the circumstances, to an officer who consented to or connived in the failure. It stands on its own: an employer that consults its staff well but forgets HR1 has still committed the notification offence.
Where a trade union is recognised for the group of employees affected, it consults through that union and nothing further is needed to establish who represents them. Where no union is recognised, which is the position at most small and medium employers, the business has to give the affected staff a fair opportunity to elect representatives from among themselves before substantive consultation begins. Running one-to-one conversations with each employee does not satisfy the collective consultation duty on its own, however often or however thoroughly they happen. The duty is to consult representatives who speak for the whole group's position.
Running the election properly matters as much as running it at all: enough representatives to cover everyone affected, a fair method of choosing them, and enough time for the result to be in place before the clock on the 30 or 45 days is treated as running on substantive consultation. Time spent running the election itself does not count toward the 30 or 45 days.
A protective award is the remedy for the failure to consult properly, separate from any unfair dismissal claim over an individual dismissal. It punishes the failure to consult properly, calculated separately from any award for the redundancy itself, and a tribunal can find a partial failure — one step missed, such as never holding the election — as well as a complete one. The award is a sum of money for a "protected period" the tribunal sets, based on how serious the default was, running from the first dismissal or the date of the tribunal's decision, whichever is earlier.
For a failure to consult happening on or after 6 April 2026, the Employment Rights Act 2025 doubled the maximum protected period under section 189(4) of the 1992 Act from 90 days to 180 days. For each week of that period, the employer pays the employee's actual gross weekly pay. Ordinary tribunal awards use a capped figure; a protective award does not, so the exposure scales directly with real salaries. A failure on or before 5 April 2026 is still judged against the earlier 90-day maximum, and the date that decides which maximum applies is when the consultation failure happened, regardless of when a claim about it is eventually heard.
Put a number on it, illustratively: 24 employees on an actual gross pay of £500 a week each, where a tribunal finds a serious failure and awards close to the new 180-day maximum. 180 days is just under 25.7 weeks, so each employee's award comes to around £12,850, and the total across 24 people runs to around £308,400 — before any separate unfair dismissal awards on top. A business that budgeted for redundancy pay and notice, and treated the 30-day consultation period as paperwork to get through quickly, can find the real cost of skipping it is many times the saving.
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Twenty. Under section 188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, the duty to consult collectively arises once an employer proposes to dismiss 20 or more employees as redundant at one establishment within a period of 90 days or less. Below that number, the business still owes each affected employee a fair individual redundancy process, including warning, consultation and a genuine search for alternatives, but the separate rules on timing, elected representatives and government notification in this article do not apply. The count looks forward from the date the proposal is formed. A plan that grows during the process can cross the threshold partway through, even if the dismissal notices themselves go out later.
Each site is normally counted on its own. The Court of Justice of the European Union settled this in USDAW v WW Realisation 1 Ltd (the Woolworths case, C-80/14, 2015): "establishment" means the specific unit an employee is assigned to work in. The 20 is counted within that unit alone, and it is never reached by adding up redundancies across every site the employer runs. A retailer closing ten shops of eight staff each does not trigger collective consultation at any one of them, even though 80 people lose their jobs in total. A single warehouse or office making 20 or more of its own staff redundant does trigger it, regardless of how many people the wider group employs elsewhere.
At least 30 days where 20 to 99 redundancies are proposed, and at least 45 days where 100 or more are proposed, both counted back from the date the first dismissal is due to take effect. This is a floor. Consultation has to begin "in good time" and cover ways of avoiding the dismissals, reducing the numbers, and softening the effect on anyone still let go, so a plan that only just clears 30 or 45 days with nothing substantive discussed in it is still open to challenge. Where the numbers or the closure date move during the process, the clock is measured against the dismissal date actually used on the day, however much that date has moved since planning began.
Yes, if the 20-employee threshold is met. HR1 is the notice to the Insolvency Service's Redundancy Payments Service, required under section 193 of the 1992 Act, and it runs on the same clock as consultation: at least 30 or 45 days before the first dismissal, matching whichever period applies to the numbers involved. It is separate from, and in addition to, consulting the employees themselves, and it is not optional once the threshold is crossed. Failing to send it is a criminal offence under section 194, carrying a fine with no upper limit, regardless of whether the consultation itself was handled well.
Affected employees, or their representatives, can bring a claim for a protective award, and each individual dismissal also remains open to an unfair dismissal claim if the process behind it was not fair. A protective award punishes the failure to consult properly. It is calculated per employee over a "protected period" the tribunal sets according to how serious the default was, which can produce different amounts for different employees inside the same redundancy exercise. A tribunal can find a partial failure as well as a complete one, so running a process that misses a step, such as never electing representatives, carries real exposure even where some consultation took place.
It doubled. For a failure to consult happening on or after 6 April 2026, the Employment Rights Act 2025 raised the maximum protected period a tribunal can award under section 189(4) of the 1992 Act from 90 days to 180 days, with the employer paying each affected employee's actual gross weekly pay for every week of that period. Ordinary tribunal awards use a capped week's pay figure; a protective award does not. A failure on or before 5 April 2026 is still measured against the old 90-day ceiling, and the date that decides which maximum applies is the date of the failure itself, regardless of when a claim about it is eventually heard.
Elected employee representatives, chosen by the affected staff themselves before substantive consultation can properly begin. Where a trade union is recognised for the group of employees affected, it consults through that union and no separate election is needed. Where none is recognised, the employer has to give the affected employees a fair opportunity to elect representatives from among themselves, in sufficient numbers to represent everyone's interests, and consultation proper starts once that election has happened. Consulting individual employees one-to-one in place of this step, however thoroughly, does not meet the collective consultation duty and leaves the whole process open to a protective award claim.
Running an election, writing at-risk and consultation letters, and advising on the timetable and the HR1 filing are all non-reserved work, so Buzz Legal can do them at a fixed price agreed in writing before anything starts. The redundancy at-risk and consultation letter template is included in every Buzz Legal subscription, and the wider employment starter pack and HR policies work are priced on employment law fixed fees. If a protective award or unfair dismissal claim is already issued, that is tribunal work, handled the same way as any other tribunal defence. It sits outside the six reserved legal activities, which go to AD Solicitors, authorised and regulated by the SRA (no. 8011228).
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