Information on the consultation
This response is submitted by the Local Government Association (LGA) on behalf of local authorities. The LGA is a cross-party organisation that is the national voice of local government. We work with councils and central government to support, promote and improve local government. The LGA covers every part of England and Wales (through the WLGA) and includes county and district councils, London boroughs, metropolitan and unitary councils.
The Workforce Team of the LGA offers advice on employment issues and represents local government employer interests to central government, government agencies, trades unions and other interested parties. The LGA’s Local Government Resources Committee, whose remit includes workforce issues, comprises elected members from the LGA’s political groups providing cross party leadership to the LGA’s policy input. This submission has the support of all the political groups at the LGA.
The LGA manages sectoral collective bargaining in local government and national collective bargaining arrangements for fire, education and related sectors, covering, in total, over two million employees. Elected councillors (and other employer organisations where appropriate) and nationally recognised trade unions work together in a positive way to reach collective agreements on key employment issues such as pay and other terms and conditions. This helps to ensure that councils, and other employers, have pay, terms and conditions that are compliant with legislation and, where possible, model best practice.
The LGA works closely with member organisations and provides advice and support on employment matters, including relations with trade unions. Given the context outlined above, it is important that the views of councils are given full and careful consideration in the consultation.
This submission is based on our knowledge of the issues as they impact on local government. We have not answered the individual questions in the consultation but instead make the following general points.
LGA comments
Threshold method
The LGA believes the Government’s lead option for the threshold method based on a fixed number of employees to be dismissed across the employer’s workforce is the clearest for employers, unions and employees to understand and evidence from the outset of a redundancy consultation exercise. This would provide a degree of clarity in establishing the duty to consult which would reduce the possibility that, due to the complexity of the calculations necessary for the other threshold methods, an employer might inadvertently find that they should have consulted when they had not and therefore be potentially liable to pay a protective award. This would therefore be the preferred option.
Threshold level
We would anticipate that even if the lower end of the proposed potential range were adopted as the threshold (i.e. 250 employees to be dismissed across the employer), this would have limited additional impact on councils, as it is likely that if this number of redundancies was proposed by a council, it would carry out collective redundancy consultation as a matter of course already.
If you would like to discuss our submission further, please contact [email protected]
21 May 2026