Mrs S Trew v Middlesex Group Limited — 2021

Mrs Trew brought a claim of unfair dismissal arising from a redundancy exercise at Middlesex Group Limited during the COVID-19 downturn. The tribunal accepted that the respondent’s order book had fallen significantly, that senior management decided redundancies were necessary in summer 2020, and that redundancy was the reason for dismissal. The respondent’s business was divided into work-based pools, and the claimant was placed in an inspection group; the tribunal rejected the suggestion that this pool had been artificially created to target her.

The tribunal found significant shortcomings in consultation, principally that the scoring matrix was not supplied to the claimant before the dismissal decision was made, despite an indication that it would be. However, it found that she was told the pool she was in at the 4 August 2020 meeting, received the matrix shortly after the first appeal hearing, and had just under three weeks to consider it before the second appeal. She did not make any meaningful challenge to the matrix, the criteria, or the scoring, either in the appeal process or before the tribunal.

The tribunal held that the selection criteria, while involving some subjectivity, were not unfair in context. It accepted that the matrix assessed 33 activities across the inspection/calibration area on a 0 to 3 scale, and found that the claimant had not shown any basis to doubt the reliability of the scoring. It also accepted the respondent’s evidence that the claimant’s role could be absorbed within other work and that there were no suitable alternative vacancies available. The tribunal further held that the failure to bump other employees did not render the dismissal unfair, particularly where senior management did not appear to have been familiar with that concept.

Applying the redundancy fairness principles and the reasonable responses test under section 98(4) ERA 1996, the tribunal concluded that the respondent had not strayed outside the range of reasonable responses. The claim for unfair dismissal was therefore dismissed and no compensation was awarded.