When I was made redundant about 8 months ago, I vaguely remember being told the following :
You can claim unemployment benefit straight away (i.e. go down the benefits office the day you get made redundant + make sure you put a claim in for HB if necessary) but obviously it takes ages to assess. Your claim is valid from your original claimdate, so they'll backdate if necessary.
Redundancy money shouldn't affect benefit entitlement. However, if they give you pay in lieu of notice (i.e. they give you no notice but pay you another month) then you can't claim until the end of the "notice" period would have been.
I think being sacked would be different, so you'd need to look into that seperately as you generally need a reason for sacking someone. If your contract has come to an end, you should be able to claim immediately (Afaik).
The amount you're entitled to depends on who you're living with, how much they earn, etc, etc. Eventually I didn't get anything (I did put in a claim) as I simply visited every employment agency in South London and "brute forced" my way into employment. I would have starved to death and been evicted by the time HB/JSA had been assesed.
The TUC site would probably a good source of info on all of this btw.
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