Mr. S Devis v IBM United Kingdom Limited — 2021

The tribunal found that the respondent had shown a redundancy situation and that redundancy was the reason for dismissal. The claimant's work was affected by a reduction in the requirement for employees to do work of that kind in the UK, including through offshoring, and redundancy was therefore a potentially fair reason for dismissal.

The tribunal rejected a number of the claimant's criticisms, including challenges to the selection pool, the use of pre-populated scores for role relevance and pay band, the use of appraisal documents in principle, and the respondent's efforts to support redeployment. It also found that the collective consultation process gave warning of impending redundancies and that the respondent had consulted about ways to mitigate compulsory redundancies.

The dismissal was nevertheless unfair because there was no genuine consultation with the claimant about his selection scores before they were finalised, and because the respondent did not ensure that scoring against subjective criteria was supported by evidence and properly checked through the agreed normalisation process. The tribunal found a significant lack of transparency in the scoring process, and that the appeal did not correct the earlier unfairness. It concluded there was a 70% chance the claimant would have been dismissed in any event had a fair process been followed, so any compensatory award would be reduced by 70%.