Trouw Nutrition's animal feed production plant on Ship Street in Belfast closed for good on 30 September, and around 29 jobs have gone, almost all of them production roles. The company told Agriland the closure is part of a new "operational and delivery model" for the island of Ireland: manufacturing has moved to Trouw's existing sites in Great Britain and Europe, with day-to-day local supply picked up through a new partnership with North Down Grain in Newtownards. Commercial, sales, technical support and customer service stay in place at Trouw's Clarendon Dock headquarters in Belfast, so this is a production closure rather than Trouw leaving the Northern Ireland market.
Country manager Bruce Spain told Agriland that "the last few months have been painful, both for our valued colleagues and also for our customers," while insisting the company remains "fully committed to the island of Ireland." Whether that commitment holds up isn't really the interesting question — plants close and supply chains get reorganised across agri-food all the time. What's worth examining is what the law actually requires Trouw, and any other Northern Ireland employer handing out redundancy notices this year, to pay the people affected. Northern Ireland doesn't use the same statutory redundancy figures as the rest of the UK, and the gap between the two got wider this April.
Northern Ireland sets its own redundancy pay cap
Employment law is one of the areas devolved to Stormont rather than set by Westminster, and every year the Department for the Economy sets its own cap on the maximum week's pay used to calculate statutory redundancy, separately from the equivalent figure that applies in England, Scotland and Wales. The Employment Rights (Increase of Limits) Order (Northern Ireland) 2026 raised Northern Ireland's cap from £749 to £783 a week from 6 April 2026. The parallel UK-wide Order covering Great Britain raised its own figure from only £719 to £751 over the same period. For the 2026/27 tax year, that leaves Northern Ireland's statutory redundancy cap £32 a week higher than Great Britain's — a real difference, and an easy one to miss, that only exists because Stormont, not Westminster, now sets it for Northern Ireland employees.
What that £32 a week actually does to a redundancy payment
Statutory redundancy pay is built from three things: age during each complete year of service, length of continuous service up to a maximum of 20 years, and a week's pay, itself capped at whichever of the two limits applies. Take an illustrative Ship Street production supervisor — not one of the real 29, whose individual circumstances Trouw hasn't disclosed — aged 50, with 18 years' service and gross pay of £765 a week, around £39,780 a year. Nine of those 18 years were worked between ages 32 and 40, each counting for one week's pay; the other nine were worked between ages 41 and 49, each counting for one and a half weeks' pay. That comes to 22.5 weeks' pay in total.
| Illustrative Ship Street production supervisor, 18 years' service, £765/week | Amount |
|---|---|
| Weeks' statutory redundancy pay due (9 years at 1 week, 9 years at 1.5 weeks) | 22.5 weeks |
| Paid under Northern Ireland's £783 cap (actual £765/week, uncapped) | £17,212.50 |
| Paid under Great Britain's £751 cap (£765/week capped down to £751) | £16,897.50 |
| Difference, purely from which cap applies | £315.00 |
That £315 isn't a rounding error or a one-off. It's the structural result of Northern Ireland and Great Britain now running two different caps, and it applies to anyone whose actual weekly pay falls between the two limits — in this case, between £751 and £783 a week. A UK-wide redundancy calculator that defaults to the Great Britain figure, which most of the free ones available online do, will quietly short-change an eligible Northern Ireland employee by exactly this kind of margin.
The other number that catches employers out: £30,000
The cap isn't the only place Northern Ireland employers need to check their arithmetic this year. The first £30,000 of a genuine termination payment is free of income tax and National Insurance for both sides. Above that threshold, the employee still pays no National Insurance on the excess, but does pay income tax on it at their normal marginal rate. Since April 2025, the employer side has also owed Class 1A National Insurance on that same excess, at 15% for 2026/27 — the same rate charged on ordinary benefits in kind — and it has to be reported through payroll at the point the payment is made, not folded into the annual P11D(b) process.
Say a more senior illustrative departure from a closure like this one — a shift manager with a contractual enhanced-redundancy clause — ends up with a total termination package of £48,000, combining statutory redundancy with a negotiated top-up. The first £30,000 is free of tax and NI for everyone. The remaining £18,000 is still free of employee National Insurance, with income tax due on it at the employee's marginal rate — but the employer now owes Class 1A NI on that £18,000, due in full regardless of the employee's own tax position.
| Illustrative £48,000 termination package | Amount |
|---|---|
| Total termination payment | £48,000 |
| Tax-free and NI-free (first £30,000) | £30,000 |
| Taxable, NIC-able excess | £18,000 |
| Employer Class 1A NI due on the excess, at 15% | £2,700 |
| Employee NI due on the excess | £0 |
What it means for a Northern Ireland employer specifically
Three things follow directly from this. First, use £783 as the Northern Ireland cap when calculating statutory minimums this year, not £751 — getting it backwards either short-changes a departing employee, which is a legal exposure, or overpays against a figure that was never the right one to use. Second, budget the 15% Class 1A charge into the real cash cost of any package above £30,000: it's easy to price a severance offer against what the employee actually takes home and forget the employer-side NI bill that comes with the excess, and that bill lands at the point of payment, not at year end. Third, treat the RTI reporting of that excess as a payroll-run task rather than something to tidy up later, since HMRC expects it reported when the payment is made.
We've written before about what employer National Insurance adds to the cost of hiring in Northern Ireland; this is the mirror image of that calculation on the way out of a job. Getting both the Northern Ireland-specific cap and the Class 1A treatment right before any offer letters go out is exactly what our payroll service is built to check, and our business advice service can model the full cash cost of a restructuring before you commit to the numbers.
What to do this week
If you're calculating a Northern Ireland redundancy payment, confirm you're using the £783 weekly cap set out in the Employment Rights (Increase of Limits) Order (Northern Ireland) 2026, not a UK-wide default that will usually show Great Britain's £751 figure instead. If any termination package you're planning will go above £30,000, check HMRC's current guidance on Class 1A National Insurance on termination awards at gov.uk's CWG5 guidance before you agree a figure with the departing employee, so the employer NI cost is in the budget from the start rather than a surprise on the payslip.
What's still uncertain, and when we'll know
Trouw Nutrition hasn't published a breakdown of how the 29 affected roles' redundancy packages split between the statutory minimum and any enhanced or voluntary terms, and it isn't public whether any staff were offered redeployment to the company's continuing Belfast operation or its sites in Great Britain and Europe. It also hasn't said whether North Down Grain, its new Newtownards supply partner, is taking on any of the affected production staff. Trouw's UK and Ireland accounts, filed at Companies House, are the next point site-level costs could in principle become checkable, though group filings for a business operating in 105 countries don't typically break a single site's redundancy costs out separately, so this detail may not surface at all. What is fixed and checkable now: the £783 and £751 caps, confirmed in both 2026 Orders, and the 15% Class 1A rate, unchanged since April 2025 with no Budget date yet set that could move it again.