Mr K Ogundiran v Aeromet international Limited — 2021

Mr K Ogundiran, who identified as Black British and Nigerian born, was employed by Aeromet International Limited from August 2016 and became Engineering Project Manager at Sittingbourne in July 2017. His 2017 offer letter said that if the engineering project manager role were made redundant, the company would allow him to resume his previous role as maintenance engineer, and the tribunal accepted that this term formed part of the contract. In January 2020 the respondent announced redundancies at the Sittingbourne site, pooled the claimant in the engineering/technical department, scored him against criteria derived from the skills matrix, selected him for redundancy, and gave notice of dismissal.

On the breach of contract issue, the tribunal held that the contractual clause gave the claimant the right to return to a maintenance engineer role in Rochester if his project manager post was made redundant. It found that he made clear in consultation and appeal that he wanted to exercise that clause, but that the respondent never clearly told him that it would allow the return, never set out the terms on which it would do so, and never followed through the further discussion that had been indicated. The tribunal therefore found that the respondent breached the contract by not allowing the claimant to return to Rochester.

On unfair dismissal, the tribunal accepted redundancy as the reason for dismissal but found the process unfair overall. It held that the pooling arrangements and most of the selection criteria were within the range of reasonable responses, and that Mr Moses generally scored the pool fairly, but it found that the claimant was unfairly docked a mark for his 2019 suspension because that suspension was not a finding of misconduct and he had been exonerated. More importantly, the tribunal found that the claimant was not given the selection assessment, the precise criteria, or his ranking in time to make proper representations or pursue the appeal effectively, and that the failure to clarify the Rochester maintenance engineer option was also outside the range of reasonable responses.

The race discrimination claim was dismissed. The tribunal stepped back from the evidence and found no inference of discrimination: the claimant’s suspension by Mr SS, the scoring decision made by Mr Moses, the pooling decision made by Mr Rogers, and the failure to offer the Rochester role were all found to have been driven by business and redundancy considerations or by a procedural mix-up. The tribunal concluded that a comparator of a different race in the same position would have been treated in the same way. A remedy hearing was to be listed separately.