Sarah Munro v Hinton Road Investment Limited — 2024

Sarah Munro had worked for the business since 2006 and had been transferred in late 2022 to Bourne Asset Management Limited as Head of Bourne Space. The tribunal accepted that the business had been under financial pressure since at least November 2022. It found that a redundancy process began before the TUPE transfer and that, after the transfer to Hinton Road Investment Limited on 5 May 2023, the employer continued with a process aimed at merging the claimant’s role with Ms Trickey’s into a single Commercial and Operations Manager position.

The automatic unfair dismissal claim under TUPE failed. Although the dismissal occurred close to the transfer, the tribunal found that the transfer was not the sole or principal reason for dismissal. It accepted that the real reason was ongoing cost cutting and redundancy within a financially difficult business, and that the post-transfer process was a continuation of the pre-transfer restructuring. The tribunal also said that, if necessary, the dismissal would have been justified by an economic reason entailing changes in the workforce.

The ordinary unfair dismissal claim succeeded. The tribunal found there was a genuine redundancy situation within s.139 ERA 1996 because fewer employees were needed after the restructure. However, it held that the procedure was unfair because the selection pool was narrow, the scoring criteria were not properly explained or shared, and consultation was opaque. It also found that the grievance raised on 24 May 2023 was not properly investigated and that the appeal response on 16 June 2023 was cursory. The complaint that the claimant was not allowed to be accompanied at the consultation meeting did not succeed.

On remedy-related issues, the tribunal assessed that a fair procedure would have given the claimant a 50% chance of being fairly selected for redundancy, so any compensation would have been reduced by 50% on Polkey grounds. It said that any compensation should also receive a 10% uplift for the ACAS Code breach, and it declined to make any deduction for contributory conduct. No monetary award was quantified in this liability judgment.