Mr David Green (Counsel) For the v Respondent — 2019

Louisa Kassell had worked for Unilever since 2008 and, by March 2016, was working part-time as Digital Transformation Manager in the eCommerce team. The tribunal found her to be a high-performing employee with good prospects. After her daughter was born on 5 February 2017, she went on maternity leave, while Unilever was carrying out the Connected 4 Growth restructuring across the sales function and her team.

The tribunal found that the claimant’s Digital Transformation role was a specialist transformation post and that, by 2017, the work had been mainstreamed across the business and was expected to cease or diminish. It accepted that the respondent had genuinely reviewed the structure of the team and that the claimant’s role, together with other roles in the team, was affected by the wider restructuring. On that basis, the tribunal rejected the automatic unfair dismissal case under section 99 ERA 1996 and Regulation 10 of the Maternity and Parental Leave Regulations 1999. It found that no suitable alternative vacancy existed before 30 June 2017, that the proposed Digital Marketing Manager role was genuinely a full-time 2B post, and that the claimant had been offered it.

The tribunal upheld ordinary unfair dismissal. It accepted redundancy as the reason for dismissal and found that the decision to treat the post as redundant was within the band of reasonable responses, but it criticised the consultation process. The claimant was given too little information at the consultation meetings about the proposed reorganisation, the pool, and the job descriptions, and the appeal material was only provided after dismissal without an opportunity for her to respond to it. The tribunal said the process up to dismissal was inadequate for a sophisticated employer, although it considered the claimant would probably still have been made redundant after a reasonable consultation process.

The direct discrimination claim under section 13 Equality Act 2010 failed because the tribunal found no evidence that the dismissal was because of maternity leave. The section 18 pregnancy and maternity discrimination claim also failed: the tribunal accepted that the timing of the redundancy process, starting about six weeks after the birth, was unfavourable, but found the reason was the C4G redundancy exercise and not the claimant’s maternity leave. The part-time worker claim failed for similar reasons, with the tribunal finding no evidence that the dismissal was because she worked part-time and noting that Mr Comiskey, the closest comparator, was also made redundant. The separate Regulation 19 Maternity and Parental Leave Regulations claim was withdrawn during the hearing and dismissed on withdrawal. No monetary remedy was quantified in this judgment.