I wrote to you before Christmas explaining that Prospect had reached agreement with BT on a reorganisation policy which applies to all BT managers and professionals and which includes voluntary redundancy terms.

Significantly its states that BT will continue to seek to achieve any required reductions through voluntary means and commits to consulting the recognised trade unions should the need arise to make any staff reductions.

The policy reiterates BT’s strong history of redeploying, retraining and reskilling employees impacted by restructuring.

What’s important to note is that this agreement will only be relevant where BT has declared a redundancy situation and in those circumstances there are very clear legal requirements on them to consult the trade unions and to mitigate against the need for redundancies.

The voluntary redundancy terms will not replace paid leavers terms and will only be available in a genuine redundancy situation.

The terms are one month of pay for each year of service up to four years’ of service, then an additional two weeks for each subsequent year of service, plus contractual notice, with an overall cap of two years pay.

Inevitably the mention of redundancy may give rise to some anxiety but I would like to reassure you, as far as I’m able, that BT will only consider the use of redundancy when it has thoroughly considered all its existing processes for managing change (redeployment, retraining, reskilling, voluntary paid leavers, recruitment freezes, contractor and agency displacement).

However it was important to communicate this now because we’ve received lots of questions as part of the pensions consultation about redundancy terms.

BT will also be including some information about this in their pensions FAQ and will upload the policy to HR home in April 2018.

If you have any questions or comments about this please send them to [email protected]