Yes! If you employ anyone, be it a nanny, receptionist, or sales person means that you have responsibilities under employment law.

As is usual in law, ignorance is not a defence and will not protect you!

You don’t need to pay redundancy to staff who have worked less than two years for you. You will obviously have to pay them their notice period.

You do need to pay redundancy to staff who have worked for you for more than two years. Statutory redundancy pay is currently max £538 for every completed year’s service. You will have to pay them their notice period.

In addition, you will have to follow a fair and reasonable consultation process. This needs to be at least 3 weeks long.

Example

Sarah has worked for you for 5 years. Her notice period is one week for every completed year of service. Her weekly pay is £600. You would start the redundancy consultation process. You would pay her and she would work for those weeks, as usual. Then you would terminate her employment. You would give her 5 weeks x £600 notice pay (subject to tax and NI) and 5 x £538 redundancy pay (week’s pay capped at £538, paid gross).

The process normally is three weeks consultation – it is a grey area.

The ACAS guide is that it should be a reasonable consultation period.

I have argued with clients, who then didn’t stay clients for very long, that one day was a reasonable consultation period.

No, it’s not and you don’t want to be paying a lawyer £250 to £350 an hour to argue that it is with a judge.

So what has been seen as fair and reasonable is if you are closing down the business entirely, which is unlikely in a golf club but not impossible, then two weeks because it is absolutely closing dead, there’s nothing left, fine

But if you are keeping on the business then it’s going to be three weeks consultation period is seen as fair to get people used to the idea of being made redundant to look for other roles within the old club and then to make the termination at the end

So you’ve spoken to them individually. You’ve offered them all the jobs that are open, you don’t make any decision at this stage about whether they are suitable for them or not.

You don’t say, “Oh but that s not going to pay enough so therefore, I’m not going to offer it”. You offer every single role in the golf club to every person and every person has the right to apply for it.

It doesn’t mean they have the right to get it, but they have the right to apply for it

And then the next stage is they have about a week to think about which jobs they want to apply for.

And then you would say, “Who wants to apply for this job?”

And then if it’s one person that’s a really straightforward process of having a meeting and if they’re suitable, obviously, that they then get that job.

If there are several people you will have to work on the criteria’s to make sure you get the right people in that role.

costs of redundancy, so that you have this in mind is you need to do three weeks consultation. Which is a normal salary and you’re paying tax and national insurance on that. Plus, their notice period, which again, is their normal salary with tax and national insurance paid on it.

You can pay them in lieu of notice that’s what pylon means, P-I-L-O-N, payment in lieu of notice. It used to be you could pay PILON tax-free you can’t do that anymore. I think it changed two years ago, certainly it’s gone now. If you pay them PILON, you would have to pay out any holiday they haven’t taken and you’d have to come to an agreement on any time off in lieu that they were owed.

If you put them on gardening leave, then you can get them to take their holiday or at least in theory during their gardening leaf period and to have their time off in lieu during their gardening period.  Then the cost on top of that is the statutory redundancy pay. Which is one week’s pay or the cap for every completed year of service, and it’s the lower amount.

So, if their week’s pay is lower than the cap of 538 pounds that’s what they would be paid. Okay, that’s tax-free. There is waiting, if you are 41 or older while you’re working for a company, for a club, then you get one and a half times waiting.

What you need to do if you go onto that link that will bring you to the government website. And that’s what we use as well. You need their date of birth, their weekly pay, how long they’ll have been with you uh when you make them redundant, and it will work out how much they’re entitled to. And then you know what you’re going to have to pay to park company.

And then some clubs will say well we don’t have the money to do that. So, then we need to be thinking about different strategies.

To make the process a bit easier is to ask for volunteers a little red man there putting up his hand. Voluntary redundancies, so the way to get people to volunteer for redundancy is to offer them more than they would have got if they were made compulsory redundant.

So, if you might need to offer them a signing bonus, you might need to remove the cap on their weekly pay and put it up to what the higher amount. Whatever is higher either the 538 or their actual weekly pay. The thing is you need to know your numbers. What can you afford to throw at this to make it an easier process?

Can you afford a signing bonus? Can you afford to remove the cap? Only you will know that from your own numbers. The aim of this is to make the process smoother. It however still counts as a termination from the employer. It’s not counted as a resignation from the employee.