Employment Rights Act 2025

A consultation is asking for views on the level and methods by which the organisation-wide threshold for triggering collective redundancy obligations might be set.

Section 29 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 will, once brought into force (expected in 2027), amend the collective redundancy framework so that employers must fulfil collective consultation and notification obligations whenever it is proposing to dismiss as redundant within a period of 90 days or less:

• 20 or more employees at one establishment, or
• at least a threshold number of employees across an entire organisation (with the threshold number to be determined in regulations)

(Additionally, the maximum period of a protective award for failure to comply with both the existing and new consultation obligations will double from 90 days’ pay to 180 days’ pay from April 2026.)

The consultation (which closes on 21 May 2026) looks at how the organisation-wide threshold should be set.

The government favours one of two approaches: a single fixed number applying to all employers regardless of size (set somewhere between 250 and 1,000 redundancies) or a tiered fixed number setting different fixed thresholds for employers of different sizes, for example:

• 250 redundancies for employers with up to 2,500 employees
• 500 redundancies for employers with 2,500-9,999 employees, and
• 750 redundancies for those with 10,000 or more employees