Round #471

An employee with 20 months' service was dismissed for redundancy. They are claiming unfair dismissal. Do they have a valid claim?

**No, they do not have a valid unfair dismissal claim.** In the UK (the jurisdiction where these rules apply), employees generally need **at least 2 years’ continuous service** to bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim. This qualifying period has applied since 6 April 2012. - 20 months’ service is below the 2-year threshold. - Redundancy is a potentially fair reason for dismissal, but the employee still needs the qualifying period to challenge the fairness of the redundancy selection or procedure. ### Exceptions (none appear to apply here) The 2-year rule does **not** apply in cases of: - Automatically unfair dismissal (e.g. whistleblowing, health & safety, trade union reasons, asserting a statutory right). - Discrimination (age, sex, race, disability, etc.) — these claims have no qualifying period. - Certain other protected categories (e.g. pregnancy, maternity). The question gives no indication of any automatically unfair reason or discrimination, so the normal 2-year rule applies. ### Summary With only 20 months’ service and a straightforward redundancy dismissal, the employee is **not eligible** to claim unfair dismissal. They may still have other rights (e.g. redundancy pay if they qualify, or a claim for breach of contract/wrongful dismissal), but not unfair dismissal.

```csharp using System; namespace HrCompliance.Evaluation { public sealed class RedundancyUnfairDismissalEvaluator { private const int QualifyingServiceMonths = 24; public ClaimEvaluationResult Evaluate(int monthsOfService, string dismissalReason) { if (monthsOfService < 0) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException(nameof(monthsOfService)); if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(dismissalReason)) throw new ArgumentException("Dismissal reason is required.", nameof(dismissalReason)); var normalizedReason = dismissalReason.Trim().ToLowerInvariant(); if (monthsOfService < QualifyingServiceMonths) { // No qualifying service → no ordinary unfair dismissal claim // (automatically unfair dismissals are out of scope for this simple evaluator) return new ClaimEvaluationResult( HasValidClaim: false, Reason: "Employee has not completed the two-year qualifying period required for an ordinary unfair dismissal claim."); } if (normalizedReason.Contains("redundancy")) { return new ClaimEvaluationResult( HasValidClaim: true, Reason: "Employee has qualifying service. A redundancy dismissal can be unfair if the employer failed to follow a fair procedure (consultation, selection criteria, consideration of alternatives, etc.)."); } return new ClaimEvaluationResult( HasValidClaim: true, Reason: "Employee has qualifying service. Further analysis of the reason and procedure is required."); } } public sealed record ClaimEvaluationResult(bool HasValidClaim, string Reason); } ``` **Registration example (ASP.NET Core / generic host):** ```csharp services.AddSingleton<RedundancyUnfairDismissalEvaluator>(); ``` **Usage:** ```csharp var evaluator = serviceProvider.GetRequiredService<RedundancyUnfairDismissalEvaluator>(); var result = evaluator.Evaluate(20, "redundancy"); Console.WriteLine(result.HasValidClaim); // false Console.WriteLine(result.Reason); ``` The employee does not have a valid ordinary unfair dismissal claim because they have only 20 months’ service and therefore fall short of the two-year qualifying period. The code above encodes this rule directly while remaining extensible for future automatically-unfair or procedural checks.