Redundancy Pools and Selection Criteria

In this article we will cover what a redundancy pool and selection criteria for a redundancy pool with examples to make this as simple as possible.

If more than one person does the same or a similar job in your business and you need to make redundancies, you cannot simply choose who goes. The law requires you to identify a pool of employees and apply fair, objective criteria to select from that pool. This guide explains what that means, how to do it correctly, and where employers most commonly go wrong.

What is a redundancy pool? A simple explanation.

A redundancy pool is the group of employees you consider together who do the same or similar role when deciding who to make redundant.

Think of it this way. If you have five people doing the same job and you need to reduce that number to three, you cannot just pick two of them and say those roles are redundant. You have to put all five into a pool, apply the same criteria to all five, score them all consistently, and select the two with the lowest scores.

The pool exists to ensure the selection is fair. It prevents an employer from engineering the process to get rid of a specific person they have decided on in advance. If you do that and found to have done that you will be going to a tribunal. Do this right.

A simple example

Example 1: Small marketing agency

You run a marketing agency with eight employees. Three of them are account managers doing broadly the same work. Business has slowed and you need to reduce to two account managers.

Your pool is all three account managers. You cannot create a pool of just two of them and exclude the third because you want to keep them. All three go into the pool. All three are scored against the same criteria. The one with the lowest score is selected for redundancy.

Example 2: Small construction company

You have four labourers on site doing identical work. You need to reduce to two. Your pool is all four labourers. Same criteria applied to all four. The two with the lowest scores are selected.

Example 3: Solo role

You have one bookkeeper. The bookkeeping function is being outsourced entirely. There is no pool. The bookkeeper is the only person doing that role and it is disappearing completely. This is called a pool of one. No selection criteria are needed because there is no choice to make.

How wide should the pool be?

This is where employers often make mistakes. The pool should include every employee who does the same or a similar job, or whose job is interchangeable with the role being made redundant.

Always define the pool based on roles and interchangeability before you think about individuals. Start with the question: which roles in this business are doing the same or similar work? The people doing those roles form your pool. Do not start by thinking about which individuals you want to keep and then build the pool around them. Tribunals are very good at spotting when a pool has been constructed to reach a predetermined outcome.

In most cases it will make sense for the employer to keep the pool relatively narrow, so that the process is more contained and so there is less scope for employees to compare themselves to others. A tightly defined pool based on genuine role similarity is both legally safer and practically simpler.

The test for including someone in a pool:

• Do they do the same work as the role being made redundant?

• Could they do the job of the person at risk without significant retraining?

• Are the two roles broadly interchangeable?

If the answer to any of these is yes, that person belongs in the pool.

Can a pool of one ever be fair?

Yes, sometimes. If there is only one employee affected, they are classed as self-selecting and no selection pool is required. If a role is genuinely unique and no other employee does similar work, a pool of one is legitimate.

However tribunals scrutinise pools of one carefully. In the case of Mogane v Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, the Employment Appeal Tribunal found it was not reasonable to adopt only one selection criterion for the redundancy which simultaneously decided the pool of employees and which specific employee was to be dismissed. The Trust's decision to dismiss the employee whose contract was about to expire immediately identified her as a pool of one and therefore as the person to be dismissed before any level of consultation took place.

The lesson: if there are other employees doing similar work, do not engineer a pool of one to avoid a selection process. The pool must reflect reality, not convenience.

What are selection criteria and why do they matter?

Selection criteria are the measures you use to score everyone in the pool to decide who is selected for redundancy.

They matter because without them, any selection decision is subjective. Subjective decisions are indefensible in a tribunal. The criteria must be objective, measurable, and applied consistently to every person in the pool. They must also be defined and weighted before anyone is scored, not invented afterwards to justify a decision already made.

Your criteria should be objective and measurable. If you cannot point to a document, a record, or a piece of evidence to justify a score, the criterion is too subjective to use.

Good selection criteria: what to use

Here are the criteria that are most commonly used and most likely to withstand tribunal scrutiny.

Skills and qualifications The specific technical skills, qualifications, or competencies needed for the roles that will remain after the redundancy. This is one of the strongest criteria because it is directly linked to the business's future needs. It must be defined before scoring: what specific skills does the business need going forward? Score each person against those specific requirements based on documented evidence.

Performance record Based on formal appraisals, performance reviews, output records, or documented performance improvement plans. Must be drawn from written records, not from memory or personal impression. If your appraisal records are sparse or inconsistent, this criterion is risky because scores will look arbitrary.

Disciplinary record Formal written warnings on file only. Verbal conversations, informal chats, and undocumented concerns do not count and must not be used. Using undocumented conduct issues as a basis for scoring is unfair and a tribunal will see through it immediately.

Flexibility and adaptability Documented evidence of willingness and ability to take on different tasks, work different hours, or operate across different parts of the business. Must be based on actual observed and recorded behaviour, not assumptions or personal preferences.

Qualifications relevant to future roles Specific certificates, licences, or qualifications that will be genuinely needed in the restructured team. Must be directly relevant to the business's actual future requirements.

Relevant training completed Training undertaken in a relevant area over a defined period, for example the past two years. Documented by training records.

Criteria to use with caution

Attendance record

Attendance is a commonly used criterion and can be legitimate, but it carries the highest discrimination risk of any criterion on the list. Share provisional scores with individuals and allow them to comment or correct factual inaccuracies. More importantly, before using attendance, you must remove from the record any absences related to:

• Disability or medical conditions that may qualify as disability

• Pregnancy and maternity leave

• Paternity, adoption, or shared parental leave

• Other approved medical or protected leave

If you score an employee poorly on attendance because they were off sick with a condition that qualifies as a disability, that is disability discrimination. If you score a woman poorly because of her maternity leave absences, that is sex discrimination and pregnancy discrimination. The attendance criterion is only safe if it is based on unprotected absences only and applied consistently to everyone in the pool.

Length of service

Length of service can be used as one criterion among several. It cannot be used as the sole or primary criterion. It is not reasonable to adopt only one selection criterion for the redundancy. Using length of service alone disproportionately disadvantages younger workers, which can constitute indirect age discrimination. Combined with other criteria and given an appropriate weighting, it is a legitimate factor.

Criteria to avoid entirely

Personal impression or attitude Completely subjective. Cannot be measured. Will not survive tribunal scrutiny.

Potential or future value Too speculative and almost impossible to evidence objectively.

Part-time status Using part-time status as a criterion is indirect sex discrimination because women are disproportionately represented in part-time roles.

Any criterion that effectively pre-selects the person you have already decided to remove This is the most important rule of all. If a tribunal concludes the pool had been engineered solely to target a person that management did not like, it would be unfair.

Where discrimination comes in

This is the area that catches employers most often. Discrimination in a redundancy selection does not have to be intentional to be unlawful. Indirect discrimination — where a criterion appears neutral but disproportionately disadvantages a protected group — is just as serious as deliberate discrimination.

Age discrimination Using length of service as the sole criterion disadvantages younger workers. Giving higher scores for qualifications that older workers are less likely to have had access to can disadvantage older workers. Before finalising criteria, ask: do any of these disproportionately affect employees of a particular age?

Sex discrimination Penalising part-time workers disadvantages women disproportionately. Including maternity leave absences in attendance scores is sex and pregnancy discrimination. Any criterion that in practice scores women lower than men without objective justification is potentially discriminatory.

Disability discrimination Including disability-related absences in attendance scores is disability discrimination. Failing to consider whether a lower score on a particular criterion reflects the employee's disability rather than their capability is also a risk. Before finalising scores for a disabled employee, consider whether any reasonable adjustment should affect how that criterion is assessed.

Pregnancy and maternity Any criterion that disadvantages an employee because of their pregnancy or maternity leave is automatically discriminatory. This includes attendance, performance during the pregnancy period, or any criterion linked to a period when the employee was on protected leave.

The practical check Once you have scored everyone, look at the results. Do the lowest-scoring employees disproportionately share any characteristic — they are all women, all over 50, all part-time, all from a particular ethnic background? If the pattern is there, your criteria may be indirectly discriminatory even if each individual criterion seemed reasonable. Investigate before you proceed.

How to design and weight your scoring matrix

Step 1: Define criteria before scoring anyone Write down your criteria before you look at any individual employee's records. The criteria must be driven by the business's future needs, not by who you want to keep.

Step 2: Assign weightings Not all criteria need equal weight. Give each criterion a percentage weighting that reflects its importance to the business going forward. The weightings must add up to 100%.

A typical example for a small business:

There is no legally required weighting. What matters is that the weightings reflect genuine business priorities and are set before scoring begins.

Step 3: Define a scoring scale Use a consistent scale for all criteria. A score of 0 to 5 or 0 to 10 works well. Define what each score means before you start, so the scoring is consistent across employees and across different managers if more than one person is involved.

Example for skills criterion scored out of 5:

• 5: Fully meets all skill requirements for the future role

• 4: Meets most skill requirements with minor gaps

• 3: Meets some skill requirements but with notable gaps

• 2: Meets few skill requirements, significant development needed

• 1: Does not meet the skill requirements for the future role

• 0: No relevant skills

Step 4: Score independently where possible Score employees independently by at least two managers if possible to reduce bias. Where only one manager is involved, document the evidence used to justify each score so the reasoning is transparent.

Step 5: Apply weighted scores Multiply each raw score by the weighting to get a weighted score. Add the weighted scores for each employee to get their total.

Example matrix for a pool of three employees:

In this example, Employee B has the lowest total score and would be provisionally selected for redundancy. Employee A is next lowest. If one redundancy is required, Employee B is selected. If two are required, Employees A and B are selected.

Keep the full matrix on file. It is your primary evidence of a fair selection process.

How and when to share scores with the pool

This is one of the most misunderstood steps in the whole process, and getting it wrong can turn an otherwise fair redundancy into an unfair dismissal finding.

In one case, scoring was completed before the employer had decided how many employees would be made redundant, and the claimant who had the lowest score was made redundant following a consultation process. During that process three consultation meetings were held but the claimant was unaware of their selection scores and how they compared to others in the pool until the appeal. The Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld the claimant's appeal and ruled that a lack of consultation at the formative stage of the process made the dismissal unfair.

The lesson from this and similar cases is clear. Employees must be given their scores during the consultation process, not after dismissal. They need a genuine opportunity to challenge any score they believe is wrong while there is still time for it to affect the outcome.

When to share scores: Share provisional scores with each employee at or before the consultation meeting. Mark them as provisional — the consultation is the opportunity for the employee to challenge them.

What to share:

• The employee's own scores against each criterion

• The weighting given to each criterion

• The evidence used to arrive at each score

• How their total compares to others in the pool (you do not need to name colleagues, but the employee should know whether they are the lowest scorer)

What happens if an employee challenges a score: Take the challenge seriously. If the employee can provide evidence that a score was wrong — a qualification you were unaware of, a performance record you had not considered, an absence that should have been excluded — adjust the score. Document the challenge and your response. If you reject the challenge, explain why in writing.

After being informed of dismissal, the employee argued that their scores were too low and that the redundancy process lacked proper consultation. The employer had investigated the concerns, and the tribunal found the process was fair. The key point: the employer investigated. They did not dismiss the challenge. They engaged with it, documented their response, and that engagement was what made the process defensible.

What not to do: Do not share scores only after the dismissal decision is confirmed. Do not refuse to share the scoring rationale. Do not treat the scores as confidential business information that the employee has no right to see. All of these approaches have been found to make otherwise fair redundancies unfair.

The most important rule of all

The selection process must be genuine. Not a performance. Not a formality. Not a way of reaching a decision that was already made before the matrix was designed.

Tribunals are experienced at identifying processes that were constructed to justify a predetermined outcome. The employer who designs criteria after deciding who they want to keep, who scores generously in areas where their preferred employee happens to be strong, or who excludes employees from the pool who should logically be in it — that employer will not be protected by the existence of a matrix.

A well-designed, consistently applied, transparently shared selection process is your protection. It demonstrates that the decision was fair, evidenced, and made on business grounds rather than personal ones.

Redundly guides UK small business owners through the redundancy selection process, including pool identification, criteria design, scoring, and the consultation process. Built-in risk flags identify potential discrimination before it becomes a tribunal claim. From £149 at redundly.co.uk.