Like many organisations we may have to reduce staffing costs. Is it lawful to terminate employees on fixed term contracts first or must they always be considered equally with full time permanent staff?

If an employee’s fixed-term contract expires, without renewal on the same terms as before, or is terminated as in a redundancy situation, the employee will have the same rights to unfair dismissal and redundancy protection as a permanent employee, subject to the usual qualification periods. The employer will need to follow a fair procedure to dismiss any temporary employee(s) in a redundancy situation, including following the statutory disciplinary and dismissal procedure.

It used to be common practice in a redundancy situation to make fixed-term employees redundant before their full-time colleagues. However, the automatic redundancy of fixed-term staff, purely because of their status, is