August 1, 2026
In the three months to April 2026, 113,000 people in the UK were made redundant, a rate of 3.8 per 1,000 employees and 11,000 more than a year earlier (source: ONS, Employment in the UK, June 2026). Employers proposing 20 or more redundancies must notify the Insolvency Service on form HR1 before consultation begins (source: GOV.UK, making staff redundant), so providers often know a cohort is coming weeks ahead. What they cannot rely on is a steady supply of genuine, still-open vacancies to move that cohort into.
Redundancies in the UK run at a steady volume: 113,000 people were made redundant in the three months to April 2026 (source: ONS, Employment in the UK, June 2026), and the forward pipeline of collective redundancies is captured monthly on HR1 notifications to the Insolvency Service (source: ONS, HR1 potential redundancies). Outplacement itself is a private, employer-funded service with no statutory footing, so no official body sizes the market. The measure that matters is the re-employment rate for people made redundant, published by the ONS (source: ONS, redundancies dataset RED02). For a provider, the constraint is rarely demand, it is access to genuine, still-open vacancies to place people into.
Spacewalk gives each engagement a private, branded job board, so your consultants spend their time coaching rather than trawling job boards.
Build your branded Spacewalk job board and invite your talent community in minutes
Whether you choose to stream roles automatically, invite employers or post them yourself they are automatically matched to your talent pool
Track applications, placements and community engagement from one reporting dashboard
Unlike generic job boards, Spacewalk gives you a branded, private or public jobs marketplace your talent actually trust, with sourcing, matching and reporting running automatically in the background.
Outplacement providers act as controllers of redundant employees' personal data, so UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply in full. The ICO's recruitment and selection guidance expects a lawful basis, clear privacy information, defined retention periods and data minimisation across the candidate lifecycle (source: ICO, recruitment and selection guidance).
Right-to-work checks remain the hiring employer's responsibility, not the job board's, and candidate data should only ever be matched to genuine, employer-direct vacancies rather than passed to third-party aggregators (source: Home Office, right to work checks). This is context, not legal advice.
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer story. A UK outplacement provider supporting 200 people through a manufacturing redundancy stands up a branded job board on the first day of consultation. Instead of emailing job links, consultants watch an employer-direct feed match each person to live, relevant roles, and see application and interview activity per cohort. When the outgoing employer asks for evidence, the provider exports landings by cohort rather than assembling screenshots at the end.
With participant-level data. Spacewalk tracks registrations, board usage, applications, interviews and landings per cohort, so you can show the outgoing employer what happened to their people rather than a summary of coaching hours.
There is no official UK benchmark. The ONS publishes a national re-employment rate for people made redundant, but not a programme-level figure, so any credible claim has to rest on your own current cohort data.
Yes. Each engagement gets its own branded board, so the experience carries the outgoing employer's or your own brand rather than a generic job site.
From an employer-direct stream of verified, active roles with direct apply links, matched to each participant's skills, seniority and location. Your team can also post roles or invite employers to post, but the vacancies are not scraped from job boards or aggregators.
No. Right-to-work verification stays with the hiring employer. Spacewalk connects people to live vacancies and tracks their progress.
UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. In practice that means a lawful basis, clear privacy information, data minimisation and defined retention periods for candidate records, in line with ICO guidance.
Spacewalk supports outplacement and career transition providers worldwide, including outplacement job board software in the United States, career transition platforms for Australian providers and outplacement software for Canadian firms.
Explore Spacewalk for UK professional associations, alumni career platforms for UK institutions, UK adult education providers and UK skills bootcamps.
