M Y Cartons Ltd v. Pardey

EMPLOYMENT APPEAL TRIBUNAL 58 VICTORIA EMBANKMENT, LONDON EC4Y 0DS At the Tribunal On 16 December 2002 Before

The Tribunal concluded in paragraph 3, as we have indicated, that it had no doubt that the redundancy exercise had been sloppy. They found the procedure to be faulty. They record:

That, of course, is a proper question for them to ask in the light of Polkey . The rest of their conclusions in paragraph 3 we shall recite:

He has also drawn our attention to Thomas & Betts Manufacturing Limited v Harding [1980] IRLR 225, which was a case in which a redundancy was found to be unfair where the alternative to a redundancy would have had the consequence of short-term employees, with considerably less job status than the employee who was made redundant, being dismissed instead, and effectively thus being, as was put by Mr Burns, 'bumped' in favour of the employee.

On the basis of either party's case, that is not the wording one would normally have expected, but Mr Bourne effectively submits that one must run together the two sentences so that, on his case, 'should have been filled' is not an obligation but a finding of fact, and consequently the Tribunal 'not being convinced' should be read as a conclusion that they were convinced that in fact a fair procedure would have made a difference, because of their conclusion in relation to the fact that the new job would have been filled by the applicant, because it should have been so filled.