I'd preface the following by saying I am not a lawyer and this is my opinion. None of this should be considered legal advice.
What evidence do I have?
The chances are that if you face redundancy consultation, or even any other process such as disciplinary's or suspension, you aren't going to be prepared for it. I wasn't, and it took me some time to find my feet, and because I wasn't expecting anything I hadn't noted down any significant details in the past months that could back up my position. Who does that, right?
You might have access to your own emails and documents if you kept them, in which case you can comb through anything that might be of use. However, unless you are meticulous and highly organised...which I am not, then that will only get you so much.
You might find yourself in a situation where you think you don't have any information that you can use for your cause.
Data Subject Access Requests
It may appear that employers hold all the cards, but one really useful card you hold is that you can ask your employer for all the information that they hold on you. This is called a "subject access request" (also called a "data subject access request" or DSAR).
Any organisation that holds information about you is required under UK law to give you the information that they hold about you. Any organisation, not just your employer, so if you want to find out what information the telephone company has about you, you can ask for that. The right to this data comes mainly from the UK GDPR which gives you the right to access that data (as well as other rights) (see https://www.gov.uk/data-protection)
What information can I request?
In short, you can ask for all the information they hold if you want to, though if you are interested in information specific to an event or time period you can narrow your request to any subset of data. Why you might want to narrow your search is for two reasons:
- Information overload
- Time to gather that information
I have written about half a dozen DSAR's in the past and the first one I submitted, I literally recieved several boxes of paper with several thousands of documents. It took me weeks to read through every piece of paper and most of it was irrelevant to my needs at the time. It was a massive pain.
In most cases, when you ask for your data through a DSAR an organisation should respond within a month of your request. However, in some circumstances that organisation can extend that response time if your request is complicated or you have made numerous requests (see Article 12A GDPR). If you want access to information within the one month, then it is a good idea to narrow your request as much as you can to make it easier for the organisation to gather and respond.
What information might I get?
You might be surprised by what you get. The emails that staff use on corporate email systems, even emails that are personal between members of staff other than you. Messages between colleagues on corporate messaging systems such as Slack or Teams. Text messages from corporate phones.
Mostly, anything you do on corporate devices or systems is not private. Which is something to bare in mind to anyone using those systems, but it also means that you can potentially ask for that information since it is information about you that the organisation holds. The caveat to this is that the information has to contain data about you or can clearly identify you in some way.
There are plenty of resources online that offer DSAR templates that you can use. It's one of the few tools you can effectively use in your own situation.
Not everything, however, is plain sailing with DSAR's. I'll write up a follow up to this post outlining some of those...