An EAT decision has been handed down today in the case of Mr N Bond v Urmet Donus Communication & Security UK Ltd concerning whether employers complied with the old statutory procedures in a redundancy dismissal.
Where is the relevance I hear you cry ? Given that the statutory dismissal and grievance procedures are no longer with us. Read on for the morale of the tale, or case, as it is still relevant to today’s post SDP world……
The issue was whether the Claimant was automatically unfairly dismissed because of a failure to comply with the statutory procedure by virtue of the fact he was not informed as to how selection criteria were applied to him personally. The Tribunal found for the Respondent but the EAT disagreed and a finding of automatic unfair dismissal has been substituted.
Given this substitution and the EAT’s reliance on the cases of Alexander v Brigden and Davies v Farnborough College of Technology practical lessons to be learnt are:-
individuals should have the opportunity to make representations in relation to selection criteria and alternatives to redundancy;
but, this on its own is not enough. Individuals should also be given the opportunity to challenge the application of selection criteria to them and to understand why they were being made redundant.
Whilst there is not always a requirement to give particular marks to an employee in every case, an employer must give sufficient information in relation to how the criteria were applied to give him the opportunity of challenging and correcting and supplementing the information
Whilst failure to do the above will not now render a dismissal automatically unfair, it will be relevant as to the overall issue of fairness and Tribunals may still be referred to these authorities in support of this.
A cautionary word to employers when deciding upon redundancy criteria and weighting. The tendency is, when faced with pregnant employees in the pool, to bend over backwards to accommodate them to avoid any sex discrimination claim.
However, this can backfire as Eversheds have discovered. A tribunal have ruled that they unfairly dismissed a male employee because it feared a discrimination claim if it dismissed a pregnant colleague. Both individuals were in a redundancy pool but, because the female employee was on maternity leave, she was given the maximum notional score for her ability to swiftly secure payments from clients.
This decision highlights the danger in actually treating an employee more favourably in order to avoid a legal claim. In a redundancy context, giving women absent on maternity leave inflated scores to counter balance their absence, when all other employees in the pool are given actual scores could lead to discrmination claims from the other employees.
In Shanahan Engineering Limited v Unite the Union the EAT have considered the special circumstances defence to a claim for a protective award for failing to consult in accordance with s. 188 TULR(C)A 1992 (collective redundancy consultation).
The EAT held that even if the defence does not apply as a total defence to the complaint, where there are some special circumstances, these can be taken in to account when determining the length of the protective award. The judgment also gives some general guidance on determining the length of a protective award.
Lloyd’s Banking Group have confirmed their decision to close all Black Horse personal finance centres, which will result in the loss of 455 jobs. In addition, a further 185 jobs are at risk in the retail and wholesale business. Lloyd’s are intending to have implemented these changes by March 2011.
It has been reported that the Government’s proposal to sell the Land Registry to the private sector could result in as many as 1,500 job losses.
It is expected that the Land Registry’s 7,700 staff will meet today and be informed of the reasons behind the potential redundancies. It is expected that all roles will be affected from administrative assistants to senior civil servants.
Christmas is always a time for bursts of short term employment, extra staff in shops and restaurants, stand-ins for Santa/elves etc. Sainsbury’s have already announced that they will need to take on 20,000 temporary staff over the Christmas period. Tesco have come up with a novel but sensible idea (’why didn’t I think of that’ cry the other supermarket chains!) of supporting their staff by hiring redundant family members and friends to fill their proposed 6,000 Christmas vacancies. Simple yet effective.
British Airways have announced further job losses of 1,700, many of whom are cabin crew taking voluntary redundancy. A further 3,000 employees have chosen to reduce their hours to part time in a bid to assist BA in reducing costs. These changes are expected to take effect from November.
The trade union, Unite, have spoken out and speculatively told BA to expect further cuts in the future.
is all in a burger (or chicken nuggets with fries) according to McDonald’s announcement yesterday of analyst busting monthly sales rises. It is good to report on a company which is actually benefiting from our tightening of belts (possibly loosening again upon leaving the outlet) and is not having to implement widescale redundancies and other cost saving measures.
What has contributed to this success? Why has McDonald’s succeeded whilst others (we won’t compare to Burger King here) have floundered? Some will put this down to their re-directed focus towards food health issues (they do now offer salads), others to their highly tuned brand (whose toddler does not recognise the golden M?) and others to value for money.
Whatever it is, those working and eating and owning McDonald’s are certainly McHappy today.
Look out for a ‘Working with redundancy’ supplement to feature in early September’s Daily Telegraph. Should feature some useful best practice hints and tips as well as recent case scenarios and lessons learnt. We’ll blog again when the supplement is published.
