Mr E Shelton v Cambridge Design Partnership Limited — 2024

Mr E Shelton was employed by Cambridge Design Partnership Limited from 1 July 2019 in a new role described as Energy and Sustainability Business Leader. The tribunal found that over time the role migrated toward technical engineering work, while the respondent's business was facing a difficult financial position by summer 2022 and needed cost savings of about £5 million. The claimant accepted that redundancy was the reason for dismissal, and the tribunal treated redundancy as a potentially fair reason under section 98(2) ERA 1996.

The tribunal found that the respondent began collective consultation on 17 January 2023, listened to employee counter-proposals, and reduced the number of employees at risk from an initial estimate of about 70 roles to 32 by February 2023. It rejected the claimant's case that he had been selected before consultation began. The tribunal accepted that he was given individual consultation meetings, told his provisional score, invited to raise mitigation, informed why he had been pooled with senior electronics engineers, and offered the chance to make final points before dismissal.

On pooling and selection, the tribunal found that the claimant's most obvious home discipline was Electronics Engineering and that his role was not wholly business development. It held that the respondent acted within the range of reasonable responses in placing him in Pool E with senior electronics engineers rather than in a protected category or in a pool of one. The selection criteria were found to be clear and transparent, with utilisation, commercial contribution, and appraised performance/skills scored and moderated. The claimant received the lowest overall score in the pool, and the tribunal found that the scoring was fairly and objectively applied.

The tribunal also found that redeployment efforts were reasonable. The claimant was repeatedly directed to the vacancies portal, but he did not apply for the consultant embedded software engineer vacancy and did not put forward any workable alternative role. His proposal that the University of Oxford might fund 50% of his salary for a few months was accepted as something he raised, but the tribunal found it was not a feasible long-term cost-saving solution. Overall, the tribunal held that the dismissal was substantively and procedurally fair and dismissed the claim.