Which employers' service counts towards council and school redundancy pay?

Under the Redundancy Payments (Continuity of Employment in Local Government, etc.) (Modification) Order 1999, if you are made redundant while working for a body on its Schedule 1 list, your service with other listed bodies can be added together as though it were one continuous job. It applies to statutory redundancy pay only, and the list of covered employers is long.

What the Order does

Statutory redundancy pay normally needs two years of continuous employment with your current employer. The Order rewrites the redundancy sections of the Employment Rights Act 1996 for people covered by it. The right to a payment and the amount are worked out using “relevant service”. That means continuous employment with a listed employer or, where you have worked successively for two or more listed employers, the combined service as if they were a single employer.

The Order also treats an offer of re-engagement from any listed employer as an offer from your own employer when deciding whether you refused suitable alternative work.

The pay itself is still the statutory scale: half a week’s pay for each full year under 22, one week for each year from 22 to 40, and one and a half weeks from 41, with service capped at 20 years and weekly pay capped at £751 for redundancies from 6 April 2026. Redundancy rights shows the calculation.

Who is on the list

Schedule 1 is grouped by type of body. The headings in the current version of the Order are:

• local government, including county, district and London borough councils, the City of London, the Isles of Scilly, Welsh county and county borough councils, parish and community councils, joint boards and National Park authorities
• planning and development
• education
• careers guidance
• public transport
• police, fire and civil defence
• sports councils
• social services
• museums
• miscellaneous bodies, including valuation tribunals, probation trusts and Care Trusts

In education the list includes governing bodies of aided schools, foundation schools, voluntary aided schools and foundation special schools, and further and higher education bodies. It also covers a person carrying on a city technology college, a city college for the technology of the arts or an Academy established under an agreement with the Secretary of State. That wording was amended in 2001 and 2004, which is how academies came to be included. The exact legal body that employs you matters, so if you work across a trust and a council, ask HR to confirm that your employer is covered. Our guides to academies and maintained schools and how councils are organised explain the structures.

Part II of Schedule 2 also lets older bodies count, so service with a body that no longer exists can still be included.

Schools and councils under the Act itself

Separately from the Order, section 218(7) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 says that if an employee of the governing body of a school maintained by a local authority is taken into the authority’s employment, or the other way round, their period of employment counts and the change does not break continuity. That covers moves between a maintained school and its own local authority for all statutory rights, not only redundancy.

What it does not cover

The Order changes only the redundancy pay sections, so it gives no help with unfair dismissal or other service-based rights. See continuous service in the public sector for the difference between statutory and contractual service.

NHS trusts and foundation trusts do not appear in the Schedule 1 text, apart from Care Trusts. NHS redundancy service is counted under the NHS handbook, covered in NHS redundancy pay. The gov.uk page also says Crown servants, members of the armed forces and police services are not entitled to statutory redundancy pay, so this rule does not apply to them.

The Order also applies only if the “relevant event”, meaning the event that might entitle you to a payment, happens while you are working for a listed employer. Service with a listed body followed by a job with an employer not on the list does not carry forward.

What to check

• Find out the legal name of your employer, such as the council, the governing body or the trust, and ask HR whether it is covered by the 1999 Order.
• Give HR a written list of your earlier public sector jobs with dates and employers.
• Ask which date they hold for redundancy pay purposes, and compare it with your first day of listed employment.
• Keep contracts, payslips and P45s from each job.
• For a disagreement, ACAS, your union or a legal adviser can help with the specifics.