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Introduction to this document

Missing contract of employment letter

Occasionally, employment contracts can go missing or be misfiled. If you can’t find an employee’s employment contract despite conducting extensive searches, use our letter to advise them accordingly.

A missing contract

If you have employees who have worked for you for many years, it’s possible you may not have given them a new employment contract since they were issued with their original one when they started their employment. Even if you now have good record-keeping processes in place and store all new employment contracts electronically, with data backups in place, that may not have been the case when long-standing employees first started work for you. Documents, particularly old hard copy ones, do occasionally go missing, and even electronic copies can be misfiled. The problem might not come to light until an employee starts asking questions about what their employment contract says about a particular issue. Hopefully, they should have been given their own copy of the employment contract at the time of issue, so should not need to come to you with such questions, but it could well be that they can’t find their own copy either. Alternatively, you might yourself need to look up what an employee’s contract states, only to find that you can’t locate it.

A lost admission

If you’re in the unfortunate position of being unable to find an employee’s employment contract even after carrying out extensive searches, you can use our Missing Contract of Employment Letter. It advises the employee that their employment contract has been misplaced and asks them to let you have a copy of the one that they hold, if they have it, by your set deadline. This will then be placed on their personnel file. However, if the employee doesn’t have a copy of their contract, our letter goes on to state that, in this scenario, you’d propose to work with them to produce a new contract based on what you both agree are the terms of their employment, as defined by their offer of appointment letter (assuming you have this), any other letters or documents setting out contractual terms, custom and practice and similar employees’ employment contracts. Finally, it assures the employee that you’re not proposing to change any of their existing terms; you simply want to be able to set out their terms and conditions again in writing in a new employment contract which would replace the missing one.

Drafting assistance

When putting together a new employment contract for an employee in this situation, first check:

the employment contracts of employees who were/are at the same level of seniority and who started work at around the same time, as the general terms and conditions of employment, such as relating to hours of work, annual leave, sick pay, notice periods and disciplinary and grievance procedures, are highly likely to be the same
any template employment contract that was in use in the business at the time
the offer of appointment letter to see if that helps with any bespoke contractual provisions, such as relating to start date, job title, salary and benefits.