Redundant staff clarification
The union has issued clarification on the re-employment of redundant BBC staff by the Corporation.
This follows questions by members on rejoining the BBC after leaving on redundancy terms.
Re–employment of redundant staff
I am writing in response to queries raised by members concerning the possibility of being re-employed by the BBC after having taken redundancy. The purpose of this letter is to clarify the position and try and dispel the rumour that redundant staff are prohibited from applying for any kind of vacancy for a period of six months.
At one of the first meetings to discuss the Value For Money job cuts, in early 2005, the BBC stated that they would not be re-employing staff who had been made redundant, for a period of six months. The BBC was not seeking the agreement of the Unions when it said this, it was just setting out its policy. To be explicit, we have no agreement with the BBC that prevents people from being re-employed for a defined period.
BECTU’s understanding of how this policy would work is that if you are made redundant, whether voluntary or compulsory, the BBC would not re-employ you to do the same job, on the same contractual basis, until six months had elapsed. That does not prevent anyone from applying for any vacancies nor should it stop someone from seeking work in a different role or on a different contractual basis e.g. as Schedule D freelance. It would be up to the BBC to decide how closely it stuck to its policy.
The Unions were very concerned to avoid the position which applied for much of the 10 years prior to November 2004 whereby people would be made redundant from a continuing contract on the Friday and then five Mondays later would return on a fixed-term contract doing the same job. The five Mondays is used by the Inland Revenue to decide whether the tax-free redundancy pay should in fact be taxable. Such a short gap suggested that there should not have been a redundancy in the first place because there was a continuing need for the work to be done. This would be a waste of licence fee income on the redundancy payment as well as being disruptive to the individual.
BECTU would have no objections to someone who works as a researcher say, who is redundant, and then applies for and gets a job as a producer. Nor would we have a problem with someone who is made redundant from a Schedule D contract and applies for and gets similar (or different) work on a freelance Schedule E contract. If any of this is unclear you should contact your union official.
Luke Crawley
Supervisory Official