Ms Eilis Barry:

What is happening is that people are contacting us who have been "laid-off", but who do not know for how long they are going to be laid-off, and at what stage they will be able to come back to work. They are actually seeing colleagues return to work or people being appointed to their jobs, so there is a kind of lay-off limbo going on in certain employment situations. This is exacerbated by the lack of that legal requirement that we address to explicitly set out the length if time that workers will be on lay-off. There is also a problem because of the prohibition on people claiming redundancy sums. They are in a situation where they may see colleagues returning to work but they are not returning to work, yet they cannot decide that they want to move on and claim what may be a very generous redundancy sum. We feel that is something that needs to be examined and reviewed. There is a lack of clarity around the legal obligations of an employer in this regard. However it is exacerbated by the inability of people to turn around and claim redundancy.