Mr D Welch, Counsel For the v Respondent — 2017

At the outset, the claimant's breach of contract points were not pursued and were dismissed on withdrawal. The tribunal then considered whether she was disabled for Equality Act purposes. It found that she had hypertension and had taken Lisinopril, but on the evidence before it there was no proof that, at the material time ending on 31 March 2018, the condition had a substantial and long-term adverse effect on normal day-to-day activities, or that the medication question could be resolved in her favour on the evidence. The disability discrimination claim therefore failed; the headnote/order and the reasons do not use identical wording, but the reasons state that the claim was struck out after the section 6 test was not met.

The age discrimination case, pleaded as eight allegations, was dismissed. The tribunal found no age-related language, stereotyping, or evidence that age played any part in the desk moves, workload reviews, requests for a work diary, Companies House and insurance-related issues, the Paralegal advertisement, the handling of the grievance, criticism of performance, the discretionary bonus decision, or the redundancy process. It accepted the respondent's explanation that the changes were driven by operational restructuring and the professionalisation of company secretarial and insurance work, and it noted that the claimant had been offered Company Secretary training and that Mrs Czulowski had been appointed when she was 57 or 58.

On unfair dismissal, the tribunal held that the reason for dismissal was redundancy: the respondent's need for the particular work done by the Assistant Company Secretary had diminished over time as insurance reporting moved online and company secretarial functions were redistributed. However, the dismissal was unfair because until 26 March 2018 the claimant had not been given a proper redundancy consultation, written information about the redundancy case or procedure, or a vacancy exercise. When she unexpectedly returned to work on 26 March after severance negotiations failed, she was suspended, attended a redundancy meeting on 28 March, and was dismissed with effect from 31 March 2018.

Applying s.98(4) ERA 1996 and the Polkey approach, the tribunal held that a fair redundancy consultation would have taken three weeks and that the claimant would still have been fairly dismissed because there were no available alternative roles and she said she did not feel able to trust line management enough to return. Remedy was reserved to a separate hearing. The parties had agreed that three weeks' pay was £1,635.03, and the claimant sought £400 for loss of statutory rights and pension loss to be addressed separately.