Mr. Ashley Ede v Royal Agricultural University — 2024

Mr Ashley Ede was employed by Royal Agricultural University from 13 December 1999 and was dismissed on 17 September 2022 for redundancy. The Tribunal accepted redundancy as the true reason for dismissal and rejected any case that the decision makers acted in bad faith. It found that the Respondent had carried out a university-wide consultation, consulted the union, held the individual meeting on 10 May 2022, and provided documents and vacancies, while the Claimant did not request the further private consultation meeting that had been offered.

The Tribunal held that the redundancy selection criteria were properly consulted on and could lawfully be used. It found the scoring of the Claimant on Teaching and Learning and Workload to be within the range of reasonableness, including the panel's view that there was no evidence of contribution to scholarship or curriculum innovation and that programme management was not part of the workload score under the agreed criteria. The Tribunal rejected the argument that it should re-mark the matrix or treat the criteria themselves as unfair.

The claim succeeded because the Respondent did not follow its own procedure after scoring. The Claimant was not given his scores or an opportunity to challenge them before the dismissal decision on 17 June 2022, and the Tribunal held that it was unsatisfactory to tell him he could only challenge them on appeal. The appeal on 27 July 2022 did not cure the defect because it did not meaningfully examine how the scores had been reached and did not provide a fair opportunity to test the management evidence.

Applying the Polkey principle, the Tribunal found that if the Respondent had properly consulted the Claimant about the scoring, the Claimant would nevertheless have been dismissed by 24 June 2022. It therefore concluded that compensation should be limited to one week of loss and no further compensation, but this judgment did not quantify a final monetary award.