| Short Title: | Redundancy Payments Act 1965[1] |
| Type: | Act |
| Parliament: | Parliament of the United Kingdom |
| Long Title: | An Act to provide for the making by employers of payments to employees in respect of redundancy; to establish a Redundancy Fund and to require employers to pay contributions towards that fund and to enable sums to be paid into that fund out of the Consolidated Fund; to provide for payments to be made out of the Redundancy Fund; to amend the Contracts of Employment Act 1963; to extend the jurisdiction of tribunals established under the Industrial Training Act 1964 and to make further provision as to procedure in relation to such tribunals; to enable certain statutory provisions relating to compensation to be modified in consequence of the provision for payments in respect of redundancy; and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid. |
| Year: | 1965 |
| Citation: | 1965 c. 62 |
| Royal Assent: | 5 August 1965 |
| Use New Uk-Leg: | yes |
The Redundancy Payments Act 1965 (c. 62) was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that introduced into UK labour law the principle that after a qualifying period of work, people would have a right to a severance payment in the event of their jobs becoming economically unnecessary to the employer. The functions of the redundancy payment were to internalise the social cost of unemployment to the employer, make employers think more carefully before making people redundant, to compensate the employee for the loss of a job, and to provide a minimum sum of money for the employee in case future employment could not immediately be found. Together with the requirement of statutory minimum notice in the Contracts of Employment Act 1963, and the right to a fair dismissal first found from the Industrial Relations Act 1971, redundancy pay forms one of the three pillars of rights in dismissal.
The RPA 1965 was eventually codified in the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1978, and its provisions are now updated and found in the Employment Rights Act 1996 section 135 ff.