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Ask Samantha / Redundancy & exits

Redundancy & exits

Can I make someone redundant and then replace them?

Answered by Samantha Newton FCIPD, Chartered Fellow CIPD · Last reviewed August 2026

Careful here. A genuine redundancy means the role has gone, or the need for that work has dropped. Make someone redundant and then hire someone else into the same job soon after, and it probably wasn't a redundancy at all. It starts to look like you used redundancy to get rid of a person you wanted out.

That's a common and expensive mistake. If the real issue is performance or conduct, deal with it through the right process, don't dress it up as redundancy. If the role has genuinely changed rather than gone, that might be a restructure, which has its own rules, including offering any new role fairly. Get advice before you move, because this one's hard to undo.

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