The answer to both questions is 'no', as there is a general 'taboo' around anything to do with the 'R' word.
It was these very questions that were addressed in an open debate involving TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, and John Taylor, chief executive of Acas, last month.
Barber warned redundancy would continue to be an issue for many organisations, especially in the public sector, over the coming years. He said: "According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, the Government has only implemented 6% of the cuts for deficit reduction, with 94% still to come.
"The public sector is and will be hit hardest: usually, it accounts for just 6% of redundancies, but last year it accounted for 20%."
More than 632,000 people were made redundant in the UK in the past year. According to the CIPD, it costs £16,375 on average to make someone redundant. This suggests that last year the cost to the UK economy of redundancy was £10.3 billion. Add to that the cost to the treasury of paying benefits and lost tax revenues, the cost to the economy of lost spending, and the trauma to the individuals involved, and their families.
In looking at the reasons why compulsory redundancy happened, the consensus view of the meeting was that it was a failure of management at various levels: there needs to be better long-term planning, more communication with employees and more consideration and care in staff recruitment.
David Lennan, a former director general of the British Chambers of Commerce and a founder of Staffshare, the online secondment service, said: "Recruitment is undertaken in quite an amateurish way. Considering that an employer will pay an average employee around £500,000 over 10 years, they need to be certain that they are getting the right person in the first place.
"Once you have the right person, and have invested in them, including in their training and development, you certainly shouldn't be wasting that money by throwing them away, making them redundant.
"Economic downturns come and go, but they don't happen overnight. It is the job of directors to monitor this, and manage the business accordingly. They need to manage capacity issues in a different way, taking a more strategic approach."
Acas's Taylor added: "If we are to reduce the need for sudden, significant redundancies, then we must change the way we fund and save within our businesses. Part of that is finding new ways to retain the investment in our skills – our most valuable resources – people."
The debate concluded by, in effect, changing the question: why, in this age of caring, does the UK continue to rely upon a dated management tool, and why does it not encourage alternatives, instead of using a blunt instrument that inflicts massive social costs on employees and the economy, and wastes skills and training investment?
The blame is placed at the door of business managers, not Government. Lennan said: "Redundancy should be used as the last resort, after all the other options and alternatives have been considered, and there are many of them, including staff secondment, sabbaticals, recruitment freezes, pay freezes, pay cuts, pay deferral, overtime ban, and short-term and flexible working.
He added that there are significant benefits for not making staff redundant: "Retaining staff will better position the business when the upturn comes, when growth is often restricted or delayed, due to the need to recruit and train new staff.
"It also saves the not insignificant costs of recruiting and training those staff."
