Ms N Rogers & others (see attached Schedule) Ms N Rogers (C1) Natasha Dilloway (C2), Jamil Khan (C3), Brigitte Bishop (C4), Richard Nuttall (C5) v HHGL Limited t/a Homebase (in administration) and 1 other — 2025

Employment Judge M Da Costa, sitting alone, gave a corrected reserved judgment dismissing a multiple claim (8 group claimants under lead case 2302764/2025) brought against HHGL Limited t/a Homebase (in administration) and the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. The claimants - ex-Homebase Design Consultants on a results-based showroom commission scheme - argued that the calculation of their statutory redundancy payments and statutory notice pay (paid by the Secretary of State as statutory guarantor under ss.166-167 and ss.182/188 ERA 1996) should have included regular commission payments in addition to basic pay.

Applying ss.135, 167, 182 and 184 ERA 1996 and the case law on s.221 (including British Gas, Evans, Bear Scotland, and the analysis in Harvey), the tribunal concluded that the claimants' remuneration fell within s.221(2) ERA 1996 (basic pay regardless of amount of work done) and not s.221(3) (variable with amount of work). The commission scheme was results-based not output/productivity-based: the same time spent might or might not produce a customer contract, so commission was not part of 'fixed remuneration'. The 12-week averaging in s.221(3) therefore did not apply, and the Insolvency Service's calculation based on basic pay was in line with the statute.

The judge expressly noted that the decision was finely balanced and acknowledged sympathy with the claimants' contentions, but concluded that the binding case law required the commission to be excluded from the 'week's pay' for these statutory purposes. The PDF was truncated at 15,000 of 59,981 characters; some of the procedural and factual reasoning may not be in the extracted portion.