There's a sentence that gets said in a lot of these meetings, and it does a lot of work: "Unfortunately, the business has had to make some difficult decisions."
Here's the thing — that part is often completely true. Money got tight, a contract went, someone upstairs looked at a spreadsheet. The redundancy is real.
But that's only half the question, and it's the half people get stuck on. You go home and you argue with yourself about whether the company really needed to lose anyone, and whether you could ever prove they didn't. It's exhausting. It's usually a dead end.
The question that actually matters is the other one. Not did they need to cut jobs. Did they choose you lawfully?
Those are two entirely separate things under UK employment law. An employer can have a watertight business case and still lose a tribunal claim on how they picked. It happens constantly.
What they were supposed to do
Where roles are being reduced rather than a whole department closed, your employer has to put the at-risk people into a pool and score them against criteria that are objective, measurable, applied consistently, and genuinely tied to business need — not to a manager's preferences, and not to your personal circumstances.
Fair criteria look like this: length of service. Skills and qualifications relevant to the work that's left. Performance history — the documented kind, not the remembered kind. Attendance. Disciplinary record.
They're all fairly boring, and boring is the point. Boring means comparable. Boring means defensible.
What is never acceptable
Selecting anyone because of a protected characteristic. Age. Disability. Pregnancy and maternity. Race. Sex. Religion or belief. Sexual orientation. Gender reassignment.
Trade union activity is protected too, separately and specifically.
And here's the part almost nobody is told. Where a dismissal is automatically unfair — union activity, whistleblowing, pregnancy and maternity among them — the usual two-year service requirement falls away completely. The same goes for discrimination claims. You can bring those from your very first day in the job.
If you've spent this week assuming you have no rights because you'd only been there fourteen months, please read that paragraph again.
The scores exist. You're allowed to see them.
If they used a selection matrix, there is a document somewhere with your name on it and numbers beside it.
You have a right to that. Not a favour — a right, under Article 15 of the UK GDPR. It's called a Subject Access Request, it costs you nothing, and they have one month to respond.
Most people never ask, because nobody tells them they can. And those scores are very often where the whole thing comes apart. A 2 out of 5 for "flexibility" with not a single example behind it. A performance mark that flatly contradicts the appraisal you got in March. Attendance figures that quietly count the six weeks you were off having surgery — which, if the absence was disability-related or pregnancy-related, should have been discounted before anyone scored anything.
Ask for the criteria, the weightings, your scores, and the manager's notes behind them.
Things worth paying attention to
You were selected shortly after coming back from maternity leave. You're noticeably older, or younger, than the colleagues who stayed. You'd recently raised a grievance, or flagged something you weren't supposed to notice. You're the union rep. Or the criteria applied to you don't look like the ones applied to everyone else.
None of these prove anything on their own. All of them are worth writing down today, while you still remember the detail.
What to do this week
Appeal internally, in writing, within whatever deadline their letter gives you.
Send the Subject Access Request. Don't wait for the appeal outcome — run the two together.
Then call ACAS on 0300 123 1100 and start early conciliation. You have to do this before you can bring a tribunal claim, and the clock here is the tightest thing in the entire process: three months minus one day from your dismissal. Miss it and the claim is normally gone, however strong it was.
I know how that reads. You're grieving a job and I'm handing you homework with deadlines attached. But those three things take an afternoon between them, and the window closes whether you're ready or not.
If something about it doesn't feel right
Trust that feeling. People are usually right when they sense the scores were written to justify a decision that had already been made.
There are free, plain-English guides to every stage of this at myredundancyrights.co.uk — selection rights, requesting your scores, appeals, tribunal claims. Free letter templates too, including a formal scoring matrix request, a redundancy appeal, and a Subject Access Request. Generate and copy them free, or take all 14 as Word documents for £4.99. https://myredundancyrights.co.uk/action-plan
Start here: https://myredundancyrights.co.uk/my-rights