Mr Mark Hill v Uralmoto (UK) Ltd — 2022

Mr Hill had worked for Uralmoto as an MOT tester since January 2012. In August 2020, while Mr Turner was trying to sell the car MOT business to Mr Quinn, Mr Hill discussed the terms he said he wanted to keep. The tribunal found that Mr Turner’s principal reason for issuing redundancy notice and dismissing Mr Hill was to remove Mr Hill’s continuing employment as an obstacle to that transfer, not a genuine redundancy. The dismissal was therefore automatically unfair under regulation 7(1) of TUPE.

On disability, the tribunal found that Mr Hill had a disability within the Equality Act 2010 because he had osteoarthritis in his knees and shoulder problems whose effects were long-term and substantial but for painkillers. However, when Mr Turner decided not to give Mr Hill responsibility for motorcycle MOT testing, the tribunal accepted that the reason was commercial: Mr Turner himself did that work and there was no good commercial reason to reassign it. A remark about Mr Hill’s physical problems was not treated as the reason for the decision, so the disability discrimination claim was dismissed.

The redundancy payment claim failed because the dismissal was not redundancy. On holiday pay, the tribunal found Mr Hill had 3 days of untaken leave at termination and that the notice given on 24 August 2020 was not effective to require him to take all of that leave before 26 October 2020, so £285.71 gross was awarded. The unfair dismissal remedy was a basic award of £207.68, a compensatory award of £5,850 gross, £270 for loss of statutory rights, and £229.77 for lost employer pension contributions, after a 10% deduction for contributory conduct.