Member K Culloch Tribunal Member R A’Brook Mrs Y Allan and others (see appendix attached) v , KC Instructed by Dallas McMillan, Solicitors Fife Council — 2023

This was a stage 1 equal value hearing in claims by Mrs Y Allan and others against Fife Council. The tribunal had already held in an earlier judgment that the Red Book job evaluation scheme was a valid job evaluation study; this judgment considered the separate question whether the respondent could rely on the statutory defence because there were reasonable grounds for suspecting that the evaluations were unreliable. The tribunal stated that its findings were limited to the job evaluations specifically heard: Home Carers, Catering Assistants, Assistant Cooks, Catering Supervisors, Cleaners, Cleaning Supervisors and the comparator roles identified in the judgment.

The tribunal found that the respondent's process did not operate with the transparency contemplated by the Red Book scheme. Questionnaires were never used, the initial jobholder meetings were only the start of the process, there was no formal sign-off of agreed job facts by jobholders and managers, and the paper files that recorded the evolution of the evaluations were destroyed without being scanned or microfilmed. The Gauge software only retained the final version of the documents, and the later Excel extract of the JATMIS system was only a partial record. On the tribunal's findings, there was no reliable way to trace how answers were changed during the iterative evaluation process.

The tribunal also accepted that the corporate review process carried out by Mr Duff and Ms Erskine created scope for manipulation. The JATMIS records showed entries describing changes made 'per instruction' from management, including changes to scores and in some cases grades. The tribunal found that the corporate review team could identify how to alter answers so as to move a post across grade boundaries, and that the process was particularly concerning given the council's financial background, the equal pay settlements being discussed at the time, and the objective of reducing red-circled posts.

On the individual evaluations, the tribunal found a pattern of scores for claimant jobs that were too low and comparator jobs that were too high. Examples included Home Carers, where the tribunal considered several factor scores understated the demands of the role; Cleaners and Cleaning Supervisors, where the tribunal found issues with working conditions, physical effort and responsibility for resources; and Catering Assistants, Assistant Cooks and Catering Supervisors, where the tribunal found similarly low scores for working conditions, physical co-ordination, concentration and knowledge. By contrast, some comparator evaluations such as Road Sweepers, Refuse Collectors, Specialist Gardeners and Chargehand Gardeners contained features the tribunal regarded as difficult to reconcile with the Red Book definitions. Taking the documentary background, the lack of transparency, the corporate review process and the specific scoring anomalies together, the tribunal held that there were reasonable grounds for suspecting unreliability.