Potential redundancy and probationary period

[james_TW]

Hopefully this will make sense, but I'll try to be as clear as I can.

My partner currently works for the Post Office as a counter clerk - She's been doing the job on and off and a couple of local post offices for about 7 years and is highly experienced, well respected, very trusted, very competent, receives formal compliments, meets her sales targets, etc. She's been working for a certain post office which is run by a small shop chain for 22 months. There's been a lot of noise of late and noise historically*, some of which involves some workplace bullying, undermining and more besides.

There's a meeting today and there is local and regional senior management in to talk to them all and there has been suggestions that all the local staff will be given their marching orders with a view to replace all the local staff with new staff. Some of the local staff, from what I know, probably need to be sorted for genuine reasons (which I won't go in to) - But my partner is concerned that the time she's been there will give her no protection from being sacked.

[There is also potential that the shop chain wants to end all post office services as they've been losing money steadily (not helped by * below) but that's a separate problem as the local town serves a large local and very large wider village community in North Lincolnshire. If that's the case, then that's a separate problem.]

Her probationary period has been set to 2 years, which I felt was a simple way to enable them to remove people within those 2 years - As no point has she been given any kind of performance reviews, assessments, success measures, etc which makes me think that if they do fire her (weeks notice) that it could be construed as unfair dismissal.

My question is this: Does she have any employment protection at all in this case as her employer cannot give any evidence that she has failed to meet any reviews or anything. I felt that she might do as a 2 year probationary period seems convenient to remove someone on a whim

Hopefully this will make some sense, but she's understandably quite concerned...

Thanks

JTW

* This has included a woman who "allegedly" stole a large sum of money (tens of thousands over a period of time) but was never investigated and she was fired

[randlemarcus]

Corporate probationary policy is probably aligned to the fact that in UK law, you have very few employment rights up to the 2nd anniversary of your employment, unless she's going for a "protected characteristic" approach.

Effectively, up to two years and a day, they can turn around and say "it's not really working for us, bye" regardless of sparkling reviews, up to date continuing professional development forms, or other HR frippery. Sorry.

[james_TW]

I suspected as much but was hoping for something more positive - Thank you for your response though.