Hi Keith. Thanks for your comment.

We can’t give actual advice without taking you on formally as a client, but as a general rule, the right to reject a TUPE transfer should only be used in certain circumstances and when you’ve had advice on the options that may be available to you.

When you reject a TUPE transfer, your employment ends “by operation of law” meaning that TUPE ends your employment – it isn’t a resignation and more to the point it isn’t a dismissal. As it isn’t a dismissal it can’t be an unfair dismissal, and you wouldn’t have any claims for unfair dismissal.

Given the distance between your current and new employer, and assuming that the new employer stops operations and closes your current site, we can see how you’re concerned about what’s going to happen. This is precisely why both old and new employers are obliged to inform and consult with you over any measures (changes) they propose.

Assuming that consultation is going to start soon, now reps have been chosen, you should expect more details to be given to the employee reps during the process.

One thing we’d anticipate is that consultation will provide full details of whether the current site is going to remain open. You may find it will and nothing will significantly change.

However, if the new employer plans to close the site, then that may be an “economic, technical or organisational” change for TUPE purposes, which “entails changes in the workforce”. That’s basically a redundancy situation. Coming back to whether you should reject a TUPE transfer, if you’re at risk of redundancy, it’s probably worth hanging on to see what happens, because you’ll be in a better position if made redundant than if you walk away by rejecting the transfer.