In Person For the First v Miss T Vittorio - Consultant For the Second Respondent: Mr P Morris - Counsel — 2019

This was a reserved reasons judgment on a preliminary TUPE issue. Mr Watson had brought claims against The Vine Trust Walsall and Symonds (UK) Limited alleging unfair dismissal and entitlement to holiday pay, notice pay and a redundancy payment. The central question for this hearing was whether he was assigned to the organised grouping of employees working on the Cardiff IKEA contract so as to transfer to Symonds on 31 August 2018 under regulation 3 of TUPE 2006.

The tribunal accepted that Vine had an organised grouping for the Cardiff IKEA work and that the service provision changed to Symonds. It also accepted that the claimant worked on the Cardiff IKEA contract, but found that his contractual role as Head of P390 was much wider than that site alone. The written contract and April 2018 job description showed strategic and managerial responsibilities across IKEA work more generally, including developing new sites and working at executive level, and his normal place of work was Vine's address with travel around the UK.

By contrast, the tribunal found that the day-to-day Cardiff operation was run by Oliver Roberts, the P390 Lead Supervisor based at the store, and that the claimant only attended Cardiff about twice a month. The judge treated the claimant's time spent on Cardiff as evidence that he was working on that contract, but not as showing assignment to it. Reliance was placed on Botzen, Williams v Advance Cleaning Services Ltd and London Borough of Hillingdon v Gormanley in concluding that spending substantial time on a contract does not of itself establish assignment.

The tribunal therefore held that the claimant was not assigned to the Cardiff IKEA grouping and did not transfer to Symonds. As a result, the claim against Symonds was dismissed and the case was left to proceed only against Vine. No monetary remedy was assessed in this judgment.