Mrs Deborah Birch v Schofields Ltd FINAL HEARING — 2020

Mrs Deborah Birch was employed by Schofields Ltd in relation to overseas holiday home insurance work under a Lloyd's scheme that began on 1 January 2017. After the respondent renegotiated its Lloyd's contract on less favourable terms, it decided to stop providing new business quotations for overseas properties. The tribunal found that Ms Birch's role was primarily administrative work connected with that overseas business, and that the dismissal on 5 February 2020 was a redundancy dismissal within section 139(b)(i) ERA 1996 because the requirement for employees to do that work had ceased or diminished.

The tribunal accepted that, given the small size of the business, it was reasonable to treat the claimant as a pool of one and not to construct a wider pool including more senior or more experienced employees. It accepted the respondent's evidence that other roles, including those carried out by D Gaskell, K Gardner, M Pilling and L Bury, were not realistic alternatives for the claimant at the time of dismissal. However, the tribunal found there had been no advance warning of redundancy, no individual consultation, and no discussion of why she had been selected or whether alternative employment might have avoided dismissal.

Applying sections 98(1), (2) and (4) ERA 1996, together with Williams v Compair Maxam, Polkey and the Acas redundancy guidance, the tribunal held that redundancy was the reason for dismissal but that the procedure adopted was outside the band of reasonable responses. The unfair dismissal claim therefore succeeded. The tribunal ordered compensation totalling £2,753.77, made up of a basic award of £1,440.00 and a compensatory award of £1,313.77.

On remedy, the basic award also subsumed the claimant's right to a statutory redundancy payment. The compensatory award comprised £525 for loss of statutory rights and £788.77 representing two weeks' net pay for the lack of consultation. The tribunal did not give the respondent credit for the amounts paid to the claimant up to the end of March 2020, and it recorded that the recoupment regulations did not apply.