Mr S Sundaram v Newday Cards Ltd Heard via Cloud Video Platform (London Central) — 2021

Mr S Sundaram was employed by Newday Cards Ltd from 7 November 2017 and was dismissed with an effective date of termination of 19 June 2020 in a redundancy exercise affecting Band C project management roles. The tribunal found that the respondent had a genuine restructure proposal in May 2020, that fewer Band C Project Managers were needed, that the claimant was properly in the pool, and that the selection criteria and scoring fell within the range of reasonable responses. It did not accept that the redundancy was a sham or that the claimant had been selected because of personal dislike.

The tribunal held, however, that the consultation process was flawed. The claimant was told he was at risk on 8 June 2020 and the consultation was then limited in practice to alternative employment, with a deliberately short consultation period, no meaningful opportunity to challenge the pool, criteria or scoring, and no open mind on the part of the respondent. The tribunal found that the appeal process did not remedy those defects. For those reasons, the dismissal was unfair.

On remedy, the tribunal held that the basic award was offset by the redundancy payment already received. Applying the Polkey principle, it found that a proper consultation process would not have changed the outcome because the claimant would not have moved high enough in the scoring to be safe and would not have avoided redundancy through a longer consultation period. It found that the claimant should have remained employed for the length of a proper consultation process, assessed as one month, but that one month’s pay was covered by the ex gratia payment already made. The tribunal therefore awarded £500 in respect of loss of statutory rights, making the total award £500.