Mr P Coates v Birmingham Metropolitan College Corporation — 2021

Mr P Coates was employed by Birmingham Metropolitan College Corporation as an Employment Skills Adviser on a fixed-term contract. The tribunal found that the written contract in force was due to end on 29 August 2019 and that the May 2019 email exchange with Mr Burke did not extend that contract. It also found that the ESF Business Elevator arrangement was an income stream for the college and did not make the claimant’s employment contract coterminous with the project.

When the respondent restructured in July 2019, the ESA posts were deleted and the claimant, together with the other ESAs, was placed at risk of redundancy and invited to apply for new roles. The claimant applied for a Business Development Adviser role but was scored below Mr McCalla and Ms Cadman. The tribunal accepted that the interview scores were genuine and that Ms Millard and Ms Branch Haddow genuinely considered the successful candidates to have given better answers. It rejected the claimant’s case that the scores were fabricated or that he had been selected out because of preferential treatment to others.

The direct discrimination claims on age, sex and disability were dismissed. The tribunal held that the claimant had not proved facts from which it could conclude that the non-appointment to a BDA role or the resulting redundancy dismissal were because of any protected characteristic. In relation to disability, it found that the decision-makers did not know of the claimant’s disability at the relevant time. The tribunal also dismissed the Fixed Term Employees Regulations claim, finding that the claimant was not treated less favourably than the permanent ESA comparators, and that the garden leave decision, the handling of the meetings, and the appeal process were not shown to have been because of his fixed-term status.

The unfair dismissal claim was dismissed because the tribunal held that it had no jurisdiction to hear it: the claimant had not been continuously employed for two years. The tribunal criticised aspects of the respondent’s handling of the process, including the delay in disclosure and the way the garden leave decision was communicated, but it did not make any award. No monetary remedy was awarded.