Employment solicitors in Belfast: compromise agreements in Northern Ireland

If your job is in Northern Ireland, almost everything written about settlement agreements is written about somewhere else. Employment law here is made separately, the document has a different statutory name, the tribunal is a different tribunal, and several of the numbers that decide what an offer is worth are different numbers.

Great Britain and Northern Ireland, side by side

Start here, because it tells you which half of any advice you read applies to you. The Employment Rights Act 1996 — the source of the phrase “settlement agreement” — says of itself that it extends to England and Wales and Scotland but not to Northern Ireland.

A compromise agreement, not a settlement agreement

Great Britain renamed its compromise agreements in 2013. Northern Ireland did not, and the Order still uses the old name and sets out its own six conditions.

Why the wording in the document matters

Condition (f) is the one to check first. The agreement has to state that the conditions regulating compromise agreements under this Order are satisfied. A template drafted for an employer in Great Britain will usually recite the Employment Rights Act 1996 instead. If your agreement names the wrong statute, ask your adviser whether it does what Article 245 requires before you sign it — that is exactly the kind of point the adviser is insured to get right.

Who counts as a qualified lawyer here

The British definition is built on the Legal Services Act 2007, which applies to England and Wales. The Northern Ireland definition is shorter and names barristers and solicitors holding a practising certificate. Certified trade union officers and advice centre workers can also advise, on the same conditions as in Great Britain. For anything beyond the sign-off, an adviser who practises in Northern Ireland knows the Order and the tribunal, which is most of what you are paying for.

The industrial tribunal in Belfast

Getting there

The office describes Killymeal House as being on the Belfast Gasworks site. It lists public car parks on Cromac Street, Charlotte Street, Ponsett Street, Donegall Pass, Ormeau Avenue and Bankmore Street and within the Gasworks site itself, and warns that much of the Gasworks site is private parking with a clamping policy.

The Fair Employment Tribunal

The same office serves the Fair Employment Tribunal, which has no counterpart in Great Britain. It hears claims under the Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order 1998.

If the reason you are being asked to leave touches religious belief or political opinion, that is a separate claim under a separate Order. If the agreement is meant to settle it, check that it says so by name.

Unfair dismissal: one year, and a different cap

In Great Britain the threshold is 2 years today, with a cut to six months legislated but not yet in force. In Northern Ireland it is one year. For someone with between one and two years’ service that is the difference between having an unfair dismissal claim to trade and not having one — and a claim is what gives an offer its value.

The compensatory award has no 52-week limit

Compare that with the British rule, where the cap is the lower of £123,543 and 52 weeks’ pay. In Great Britain, for anyone paid less than £123,543 a year, the real ceiling is about a year’s gross salary. The Northern Ireland Order has no second limb. On the median full-time wage for Northern Ireland, 52 weeks’ pay comes to about £37,081; the Northern Ireland limit is £123,785. The award is still only what the tribunal finds you have lost — but where the loss is long, the ceiling here is several times higher. How the British calculation works.

The basic award and redundancy pay

The age bands are the same as in Great Britain — half a week, one week or one and a half weeks for each year, counting back at most twenty years (Articles 153 and 197) — but the week is capped at £783 rather than £751. So the maximum statutory redundancy payment in Northern Ireland is £23,490, against £22,530 in Great Britain.

The Northern Ireland median full-time wage, £713.10 a week, sits below the £783 cap, so for a typical local worker the formula uses the whole week. NI Direct says a claim for unpaid redundancy pay has to reach a tribunal within six months.

Early conciliation and the time limit

The Labour Relations Agency, not Acas

The tribunal office says that from 27 January 2020 most people who want to bring a claim must first notify the Labour Relations Agency and consider early conciliation, and that a claim needs the certificate number to proceed. Conciliation allows time — up to a calendar month, with an additional two weeks if needed — to discuss settlement without affecting the tribunal deadline.

No protected conversations

Section 111A of the Employment Rights Act 1996, which lets British employers open an exit conversation that cannot later be quoted in an unfair dismissal claim, is part of an Act that does not extend here. In Northern Ireland whatever protection settlement talk has comes from elsewhere — principally the without-prejudice rule, which in Great Britain needs an existing dispute and is worth asking your adviser about before any conversation. How that rule works.

Discrimination and tax

The Equality Act does not apply

Apart from three narrow provisions, the Equality Act 2010 is not part of Northern Ireland law. Discrimination at work here is governed by separate Northern Ireland legislation, of which the Fair Employment and Treatment Order is one piece. Anything written about compromising an Equality Act claim in Great Britain — including our own page on it — is about a statute that does not reach you.

Tax is the same

Income tax applies across the United Kingdom. The £30,000 threshold in section 403 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 applies to a Belfast compromise agreement exactly as it does to a London settlement agreement, and so does the rule that notice pay is earnings, taxed in full. How the threshold works · payment in lieu of notice.

Common questions