Claimant v Absolutely Leisure Ltd and Redwood Leisure — 2022

Ms Miles brought a redundancy payment claim arising out of the transfer of the catering and events service from Absolutely Leisure Limited to Redwood Leisure on 1 March 2018. Her ET1 said she had been employed as an Operations Manager, that she was told there was no role for that post at Redwood Leisure, and that she believed she had been made redundant at the time of transfer.

This hearing was limited to Respondent 1's application to strike out the claim under Rule 37(1) on the basis that it had no or little reasonable prospect of success. The tribunal recorded that Ms Miles had worked for Respondent 1 from February 2001, had been promoted to Operations Manager in December 2016, and had been taken through a series of consultations on 14 November 2017, 21 November 2017, 15 January 2018 and 5 February 2018 before the transfer took place.

Employment Judge Allen found that the claimant had objected to transfer, or at least that the evidence tended towards that conclusion, and accepted that there was no evidence of any supplementary agreement by which she agreed to transfer in limited circumstances. The judge distinguished Capita Health Solutions v BBC because that case involved a short post-transfer secondment, whereas here there was no evidence that Ms Miles agreed to such an arrangement. The tribunal also noted that Redwood Leisure was run by Mr Reddan, who did not need another Operations Manager, and that the work Ms Miles later did for Redwood Leisure was casual work rather than Operations Manager duties. On that basis, the strike-out application was refused and the claim against both respondents was allowed to proceed to final hearing. No final decision on redundancy payment was made at this stage.