Mr P Downey v Resource Management Solutions (North East) Limited — 2022

The respondent provided outsourced HR support and labour to CAT at the Jaguar Land Rover Halewood site. The claimant, Mr P Downey, was a Vehicle Handling Operative. The tribunal accepted that there was a genuine redundancy situation arising from a downturn linked to the Covid pandemic, and it rejected the suggestion that Mr Downey had been targeted because he had complained about facilities or objected to the proposal to roll over unworked hours.

The tribunal found that Mrs Martin chose the five redundancy criteria and that the respondent had not agreed the criteria with the union before the scoring exercise was carried out. It held that the training processes and Stand Up criteria were weighted in a way that was so obviously unfair and liable to produce a perverse result that they were outside the range of reasonable responses. It also found that the absence scores were incorrectly calculated, including Mr Downey's score, which should have been 45 rather than 41 and would have placed him 3rd out of 8, above the redundancy line.

On appeal, Mrs Tooke removed the training and Stand Up criteria and rescored the pool on the remaining criteria, which the tribunal said unfairly shifted the goalposts and further disadvantaged Mr Downey. The tribunal held that the unfairness was not cured by the appeal, that Mr Downey would not have been dismissed if the original exercise had been carried out correctly, and that his dismissal was unfair under section 94(1) ERA 1996. The judgment ends by saying any automatic unfair dismissal claim was dismissed, but it does not separately analyse a distinct claim in the reasons. Remedy was deferred to a later hearing.