Suitable Alternative Employment in NHS Redundancy Explained

If you're at risk of redundancy and your trust has put an alternative role in front of you — or you're trying to work out what your options are before that happens — this is one of the most consequential decisions in the whole process, and one of the least well understood. Get it right and the trial period gives you a genuinely safe way to test a new role with no downside. Get it wrong — specifically, turn down a role a tribunal would later call suitable, for reasons a tribunal would call unreasonable — and the redundancy payment you were counting on can disappear.

What counts as "suitable alternative employment"?

The legal framework sits in sections 138 to 141 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. In plain terms: if your trust offers you another role before your current contract ends, and that new role starts within four weeks of your old one ending, and it's either the same as your old job or not "substantially different," you're not treated in law as having been dismissed for redundancy at all if you accept it — your employment is treated as continuing, uninterrupted, into the new role.

That continuity point matters for more than just your CV. It affects your continuous service (relevant to future redundancy calculations, notice entitlement, and various other length-of-service rights), and it means the new role genuinely replaces the redundancy situation rather than sitting alongside it. This is different from simply applying for, and separately winning, another advertised NHS vacancy — SAE is specifically about an offer made because of your redundancy situation, made before your old contract has actually ended.

The statutory 4-week trial period

This is the single most useful protection in this whole area of law, and one of the least publicised. When you accept an offer of alternative employment, you're automatically entitled to a statutory trial period of four calendar weeks in the new role, starting on the day you actually begin it. You don't need to ask for this separately or negotiate it — it applies by law to any move into a genuinely different role.

One genuinely useful extension: if the new role needs retraining before you (or your employer) can properly judge whether it's working — moving into a role needing a new clinical competency, for example — the trial period can be extended beyond four weeks by written agreement, with a clear end date set out in advance. This has to be agreed in writing before the basic four weeks runs out; it isn't something you can claim informally after the fact if the conversation never happened.

What makes an offer suitable — and what doesn't

There's no single checklist in the legislation itself; suitability is assessed on the specific facts of the old role compared with the new one. In practice, tribunals and trusts alike tend to weigh the same handful of factors, and it's genuinely useful to see them laid out side by side rather than as abstract legal language.

None of these is decided in isolation, and none is automatically decisive on its own — a modest pay difference alongside an easier commute and a promotion in responsibility might still be judged suitable overall, while a role that looks fine on paper but adds an hour each way to your commute might not be. What matters is the overall picture, assessed realistically against your actual old job, not against an idealised version of it.

The unreasonable-refusal trap: why this can cost you everything

Here's the part of this page that's worth reading twice if you're currently weighing up an offer. If a role is judged objectively suitable, and your refusal of it is judged unreasonable, the consequence isn't a reduced redundancy payment — it's no statutory redundancy payment at all. You're still treated as dismissed (so notice pay, accrued leave, and your P45 aren't affected), but the redundancy payment itself, which for many NHS staff with long service runs into tens of thousands of pounds, is forfeited entirely.

Importantly, the burden of proof here sits with your employer, not with you. If it comes to a dispute, it's your trust that has to show both that the role was suitable and that your refusal of it was unreasonable — you don't have to prove your refusal was reasonable from a standing start. That doesn't mean you should relax about it, though: trusts that have gone through a proper vacancy-matching exercise and made a genuinely comparable offer are often in a reasonably strong position to meet that burden, which is exactly why the next section matters.

Grounds that generally count as reasonable refusal

Crucially, "reasonable" here is judged partly from your own point of view and personal circumstances, not purely as a detached, objective assessment — a tribunal can find that a role which looks suitable on paper was still reasonably refused by a particular employee because of what it would actually mean for them. The following are the grounds that, based on established employment tribunal principles, most consistently support a reasonable refusal:

• ✓ A lower band or a significant pay cut — especially where there's no pay protection, or protection is time-limited and the drop is permanent once it ends. A modest, temporary difference is less likely to be enough on its own.
• ✓ A materially longer or more difficult commute — tribunals have repeatedly recognised that a real increase in travel time or cost is a legitimate, personal reason to refuse, particularly where it conflicts with childcare, caring responsibilities, or other fixed commitments.
• ✓ Hours or a shift pattern incompatible with your circumstances — a move from a role with predictable hours to one requiring regular night shifts or weekend working, for example, where that genuinely conflicts with caring responsibilities or another job.
• ✓ A genuine loss of status, seniority or professional standing — not simply a change you'd personally prefer to avoid, but a real step down in responsibility, supervisory duties, or professional scope.
• ✓ Health reasons — where a specific, evidenced health condition means the new role or its commute isn't suitable for you, even if it would be suitable for someone else.
• ✓ Genuine, well-founded doubts about the role's actual suitability — for example where the description given doesn't match what the role turns out to involve, or where key details (pay, hours, location) were unclear or changed after you were asked to decide.

What tends to not hold up well on its own: a general preference to stay in your current team or building with no other substantive factor, disliking change in the abstract, or a refusal based on information you didn't actually check before declining. None of this means you have to accept a role you have real, substantive reasons to turn down — it means those reasons need to be real, specific to your circumstances, and ideally set out clearly and in writing at the time, not reconstructed later if the decision is ever challenged.

Working through your own decision, step by step

If you've been offered a role and aren't sure how to weigh it up, our SAE Decision Tool is built specifically to walk through the suitability and reasonableness factors above against your own numbers and circumstances, and to flag where your position looks strong and where it might be vulnerable if it were ever challenged.

Alongside the tool, it's worth checking your likely redundancy payment itself with our NHS Redundancy Pay Calculator — seeing the actual amount at stake in cash terms is often what makes the decision to get proper advice before responding feel worthwhile, rather than an abstract legal risk.

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Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions

Does my trust have to offer me alternative employment at all before making me redundant? +

Yes, in substance if not as a single standalone legal duty. There's no isolated statute that says "you must be offered a job" in so many words, but a trust that skips this step is very likely to fail the general fairness test for a redundancy dismissal, and separately to fail its own organisational change policy, which will almost always require redeployment and vacancy-matching to be attempted before dismissal is confirmed. In practice this means being placed on an at-risk register, having your skills and preferences matched against current and upcoming vacancies, and being considered for suitable roles — not just being left to browse NHS Jobs yourself. If that didn't happen in your case, it's a strong ground for an internal appeal.

Can I be offered a lower-banded role as 'suitable alternative employment'? +

It can be offered, and can even count as suitable in some circumstances, but a lower band and lower pay is exactly the kind of change that most strongly supports a reasonable refusal — see the sections above. A trust can put a lower-banded vacancy in front of you as an option (sometimes with pay protection attached for a limited period), but that doesn't automatically make refusing it unreasonable, and it doesn't remove your redundancy entitlement if you decide, reasonably, that a permanent drop in band and pay isn't something you're prepared to accept.

What if the alternative role is at a different NHS trust, not my own? +

The same suitability and reasonableness principles apply regardless of which trust the vacancy sits with, since the test is about the nature of the work and its practical impact on you, not which employer's name is on the contract. A cross-trust move can actually help on continuity of service in some cases (many NHS redundancy and pension arrangements treat continuous NHS employment across trusts as unbroken service for these purposes, subject to no significant break), but the commute, terms, and seniority questions are assessed just the same as they would be for a role at your existing trust.

Do I get paid during the 4-week trial period? +

Yes — you're paid at the new role's rate for the whole trial, since for these purposes you're actually working in the new job on its own terms, not on some kind of unpaid probationary basis. What the trial period changes isn't your pay during it; it's what happens to your redundancy entitlement if either you or your new manager decides during the trial that the role genuinely isn't right, which is covered in detail above.

What if I want more time to decide whether to accept an offer? +

Ask for it in writing, and don't let a deadline pass in silence. There's no fixed statutory number of days you're automatically given to decide before an offer lapses, so reasonable timeframes are usually a matter of what your trust's policy says and what's practically fair given how complex the decision is — moving offers involving a real commute change or band change often warrant more time than a like-for-like transfer. If you genuinely need more time to take advice from your union or to work through practicalities like childcare, ask explicitly and get any extension confirmed in writing, since an offer that lapses because you went quiet can be treated very differently from one you engaged with but needed a fair amount of time to properly consider.

Does accepting a trial period affect my notice period or leaving date? +

It shouldn't cut short anything you're otherwise owed. If the trial doesn't work out and you revert to being dismissed for redundancy, your effective date of termination and redundancy calculation are generally treated as running from the point your original role ended, with the trial period itself not counted as a break — that's precisely the statutory protection the trial period mechanism exists to provide. If your trust suggests otherwise, or that going into a trial resets your service or your termination date, get that checked against the actual legislation and your own trust's policy rather than accepting it as given.

Can I turn down a suitable alternative role and still get paid in lieu of my notice period? +

Notice pay and redundancy pay are governed by different rules, so it's worth keeping them separate in your head. Unreasonably refusing suitable alternative employment specifically affects your statutory redundancy payment — it doesn't, on its own, turn a redundancy dismissal into a disciplinary one, and it doesn't remove your entitlement to notice or pay in lieu of notice, which is a separate contractual and statutory entitlement that isn't conditional on how you handled an alternative-role offer. The financial risk here is specifically about redundancy pay, not your whole exit package.

What should I actually do if I'm not sure whether an offer is suitable or my refusal would be reasonable? +

Don't guess, and don't let the decision default itself by staying silent. Use our SAE Decision Tool below to work through the specific factors — pay, band, commute, hours, seniority — against your own circumstances, get written advice from your union representative or staff-side rep before you respond formally, and always put your reasons for accepting, trialling, or declining in writing so there's a clear record of what was offered and why you responded the way you did. Given that the entire risk here is financial and can be substantial, this is a decision worth a few days of careful thought and advice rather than a fast gut call.

Related guides

This page is general information about how suitable alternative employment works in NHS redundancy situations, as FrontlinePay understands the Employment Rights Act 1996 and established employment tribunal principles, correct to the best of our knowledge as of September 2026. This is not legal advice and should not be relied on as a substitute for advice from your trade union, ACAS, or a specialist employment solicitor about your own specific offer and circumstances. FrontlinePay is an independent site and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, ACAS, any NHS trust, or NHS England.