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Redundancy Pooling Difference of Opinion

Any clarification or advice from those with more experience than me would be greatly appreciated. I am contracting with a small company that has recently needed to reorganise and cut overhead costs, so 7 redundancies will be made out of 15 employees. The CFO disagrees with my recommendation on Pooling. Most roles are unique so there is no need to pool to identify those individuals at risk. But we agree that there is a pool of 3 software developers which will become 2. However, CFO does not agree with two other pools, one for a finance related and one for an IT infrastructure role. Each of these 2 pools contains 2 individuals, one junior and one senior. The CFO believes that 'the company needs a financial controller and a platform engineer, they are specific roles, not a finance role and an infrastructure role, which neither of the others can do. If I put them in a pool and say I need a qualified accountant and an aws engineer the others involved will think it's a mockery and pointless exercise, which I would rather avoid.' But my view is that the roles are similar, in a similar function and location and therefore should be pooled to demonstrate which is redundant based on the selection criteria. Rather than saying 'well you're not qualified to do the senior role so therefore you are redundant. I understand that the duties of the junior roles can be allocated to the senior and it is unlikely the junior could take on the senior duties, so it is clear the junior roles are redundant. But I just feel it is an arbitrary decision rather than a demonstrable evidence based one. Help??
181 views
  • Pooling is not an exact science and it’s down largely to the employer to define pools and justify them. As long as it’s reasonable it’s largely ok.

    I tend to agree with the FD if the business needs an FC and only one person can do this then I am not sure why you would go through the stress and pain if pooling to get to the result you know will happen. It’s more pragmatic and still lawful to treat these as different jobs.by all means record the rational and reasons why you are doing this. 

    btw welcome to the communities. 

  • If the company needs a competent financial controller and platform engineer effectively to operate post-redundancies and will be able to get by without the junior roles then it may be entirely reasonable and sensible to proceed on the basis that it doesn’t really matter that someone in a junior role might in time be able to be trained to undertake the senior one - realistically there’s no time available to be able to do that, so why pretend otherwise?

    Of course with the caveat that it all depends on the particular unique circumstances.
  • thank you for your advice, which makes sense practically speaking
  • A consistent theme so again, thank you.