Mr Ross Corbett v , Solicitor Royal Mail Group Ltd — 2021

Mr Ross Corbett was employed by Royal Mail from 1988 and moved into a DOM Support role in 2006. That post carried a leadership allowance and a dawn shift allowance. The dispute before the tribunal was whether stopping the leadership allowance from 30 October 2020 amounted to an unauthorised deduction from wages under section 13. The claimant said he had done the same supervisory duties for years and had not authorised the removal. Royal Mail said he no longer met the eligibility criteria.

The tribunal treated the Royal Mail Pay Directive as the key document governing entitlement to leadership allowance. It rejected the respondent's submission that the claimant had to satisfy every listed criterion, holding instead that the criteria were alternative ways of qualifying. On the facts found, however, the tribunal held that none of the relevant criteria applied. The claimant's own evidence was that the first employee he supervised started at 4:00am and that Mr Gordon Kerr began working in the office at 5:30am, so the claimant did not have the required period with no manager present.

On the wider contractual issue, the tribunal found there was no express term in the directive saying the allowances were subject to annual review, and it was not prepared to find a custom and practice of annual review on the evidence before it. It also noted that no job description for the DOM Support role was produced, but inferred that the role originally met the allowance criteria because the allowance had been paid for around 13 years. Even so, paragraph 4 of the directive stated that payment ceased when the employee ceased to hold a job that qualified for the allowance.

The tribunal concluded that, although the claimant continued to do the same duties, the later presence of a supervisor at 5:30am meant the role no longer qualified for leadership allowance. On that basis Royal Mail was entitled to stop payment and there was no unlawful deduction of wages. The claim was dismissed.