Mr A Flanagan v Odema Limited — 2020

Mr A Flanagan was employed by Odema Limited from 2009, with later engagement from 1 July 2014, and the tribunal found that his role at the end of employment was Project Manager. The tribunal accepted that in late 2018 the respondent’s main customer delayed new installation work, leading to wider redundancy discussions and earlier redundancies among engineers. It rejected the claimant’s case that his 2019 redundancy was driven by the 2018 dispute about the Managing Director’s daughter, and found that the reason for dismissal was redundancy.

The tribunal found, however, that the redundancy process was very limited. Consultation consisted of one telephone call and one meeting, with no genuine discussion about the selection process, the choice of pool, whether the claimant could do the Technical Manager or Logistics Manager roles, or whether he could instead have been retained or redeployed as an engineer. The tribunal also found that the decision to make him redundant had effectively already been taken before consultation began, so there was no conscientious consideration of any response. It held that the respondent acted unreasonably in treating redundancy as a sufficient reason for dismissal in all the circumstances.

The claim for unfair dismissal therefore succeeded. Applying the Polkey principle, the tribunal said a fair process would probably have taken a little longer and might have led to one of a number of outcomes, but it was likely that the claimant would still have been made redundant in any event. For that reason, it decided that any compensatory award should be reduced by 66%.

No remedy was finally determined in this judgment. The tribunal directed that the matter be listed for a separate remedy hearing, and recorded that the claimant’s own evidence about his inability to return to work before the hearing would have a significant impact on remedy.