The HR Doctor
Redundancy Guide

You have decided you need to make redundancies. The next moves decide whether it costs you £2,000 or £20,000.

The HR Doctor Redundancy Guide walks you through a fair consultation for every person at risk, generates the right letter at every step, and gives you a tribunal-ready record of the decision.

Built for UK individual redundancies under 20 at one site. £2,000 + VAT, paid once per redundancy round. Your records, ring-fenced.

Redundancy is the most legally dangerous thing an employer ever does.

Most owners run their first redundancy on instinct, from a template, or from a Google search. Almost no record is kept. The process feels reasonable in the room. It does not read as reasonable on paper.

This is where the exposure sits.

Cash. Defending a single employment tribunal claim typically runs to five figures in legal fees and management time, win or lose.

Time and focus. Weeks of your attention pulled onto a dispute instead of the business. Customer work slips. Other staff watch.

Reputation. In a business of fewer than fifty people, one badly handled exit is visible to everyone who is left. The next hire reads about it before they accept.

Rising legal bar. UK employment law has tightened the rules around dismissal and consultation in recent years. The bar for a fair redundancy is higher than it was.

If you have a full in-house HR team and a tested redundancy process already in place, this is not for you. If you do not, the Redundancy Guide is built to close the gap before you need it.

Four moves. You always know what to do next.

1. The board

Every person at risk moves through the real stages of a consultation — At Risk, Consultation, Selection, Alternatives, Decision, Appeal, Closed. You see where each person is on a single screen. Nothing slips.

2. The right letter at every step

At each stage the Guide generates the correct, legally grounded letter — at-risk letter, consultation invite, scoring matrix, redeployment offer, dismissal letter, appeal outcome — already filled with the employee's details. You review, you send.

3. A record that stands up

Every action is timestamped. File notes are written once and lock after 48 hours, so the record reads as contemporaneous. The paper trail is a paper trail, not a reconstruction.

4. A tribunal pack in one click

At the end you download a single pack for any individual at risk — every letter, every note, the full timeline, document integrity checks. If a claim ever lands, the defence bundle is already built.

What you get when you activate the Guide.

No missed steps in the consultation. The board holds the legally required sequence. You do not have to remember it.

The words are handled.The right letter is ready at each stage, pre-filled with the employee's details. You review and send.

A record that reads as fair, because it was fair. Timestamped notes, locked after 48 hours, integrity-checked. The kind of record a tribunal expects to see.

A defence bundle already built. One click. Every letter, every note, the full timeline for any individual at risk, packaged for a solicitor.

Built by an HR director who has run this process for UK SMEs for two decades.

Richard Tunnicliffe is the founder of OES HR and the author of The HR Doctor. Twenty years advising UK SME owners on the conversations that carry tribunal risk. The Redundancy Guide is the product of those twenty years, taken out of his head and turned into a tool you can run.

The integrity angle. File notes lock after 48 hours. Every action is timestamped. Document integrity checks run on the pack at download. The record is the record. It cannot be quietly rewritten after the fact.

[Placeholder — real example to be supplied by Richard before launch.] An anonymised customer story goes here (sector, headcount, number of redundancies, outcome, time and cost). Not published until Richard supplies a genuine example.

£2,000 to remove the exposure. Or £20,000 to defend it later.

£2,000 + VAT

Activate the Redundancy Guide for your business. Compared against a single tribunal defence, which typically runs to five figures in fees and management time before reputation, the maths is the maths. One mishandled dismissal can cost five to seven times this in tribunal defence alone, before the time you lose and the staff trust you spend rebuilding. £2,000 to remove that exposure is the cheap option.

There is no smaller version. The product is the product. The price is the price.

The questions owners ask before they activate.

Is this legal advice?

No. The Guide walks you through a compliant process and produces a defensible record. For case-specific legal advice on a particular dismissal, use your solicitor. The Guide gives them a clean file to work from.

Do I still need a solicitor?

For complex cases or live tribunal claims, yes. For a clean individual redundancy run properly, the Guide is built to walk you through it without one. Owners who run the Guide and then engage a solicitor later pay less, because the file is already in order.

What about 20 or more redundancies (collective consultation)?

The Guide's board is built for standard individual redundancies, under 20 at one site. Collective consultations carry a different statutory process. Book a call with Richard and he will scope the right route for you.

Is my data secure?

Yes. Each customer's data is fully ring-fenced from every other customer. You own and keep your own records. The Guide does not share data across customer accounts.

What if my situation changes after I start?

You keep access for the redundancy round you activated for. If you face a second round inside 12 months, talk to us.

Why £2,000?

Because one tribunal claim defended typically costs five to seven times that, before reputation and time. The figure prices the exposure, not the software.

If someone you made redundant rang a solicitor tomorrow, could you produce a complete, dated record of a fair process for them?

If not, that gap is your exposure. Close it before your next conversation.