Why 15 employees already triggers the obligation
The threshold is 10 or more employees, under s.4. A 15-person company is well past it, and there is no smaller-company exemption once headcount crosses ten. The lighter structure in the Act — the Local Committee — exists for organisations below the threshold, or to receive a complaint against the employer itself; it is not an alternative available to a company that already has to constitute its own Internal Committee.
The minimum composition, and the arithmetic
The Act sets a floor, not a target: a Presiding Officer, who must be a senior woman employee; at least two employee members; and one external member under s.4(2)(c). That is four people at the smallest workable size. At least half the committee must be women — with four members, half is two. The Presiding Officer is one of those two by definition, which means the smallest compliant committee needs exactly one more woman among the remaining three seats: the two other employee members and the external member.
In a 15-person company, that arithmetic is worth working through before drafting the order rather than after. It means identifying a senior woman employee for the Presiding Officer role, plus at least one more woman among the employee members, inside what may be a genuinely small pool of candidates.
The written order
Appointment has to be by written order; verbal or informal arrangements do not constitute a valid Internal Committee under s.4. The order names each member individually, states their role — Presiding Officer, employee member, or external member — and records the external member's term, which can run up to three years under s.4.
The external member, and the confidentiality undertaking
The external member is appointed under the second limb described in who can be your external member, and signs a confidentiality undertaking before joining the Internal Committee. Both the written order and the signed undertaking should exist before the committee hears anything.
Communicating the order
Once signed, the order needs to reach the people it governs. In a 15-person company that means circulating it to the full workforce and displaying it wherever other statutory notices are posted, so that anyone who might need to file a complaint already knows who the Internal Committee is, rather than finding out for the first time when they need it.
Mistakes we see at this size
- Treating the s.19 awareness workshop as if it also constitutes the Internal Committee — it doesn't; the written order is a separate act.
- Appointing an external member verbally, or leaving the seat vacant "for now" — a committee missing that member is not validly constituted.
- Drawing employee members from a pool with no available women, without adjusting for the half-women rule.
- Assuming one head-office order covers every location — each office, branch, or administrative unit constitutes its own Internal Committee under s.4, so a second branch needs its own order, not an extension of the first.
- No confidentiality undertaking on file for the external member before the committee sits.
Where we come in
We draft the written order, source and appoint the external member, and hand back the signed confidentiality undertaking as one package rather than three separate tasks.