Redundancy payments
In Jackson v Computershare Investor Services plc [2007] EWCA Civ 1065, the Court of Appeal ruled that the provision in the TUPE Regulations to the effect that a transferred contract of employment will have effect after the transfer as if originally made between the employee and the transferee could not be construed so as to give the employee a contractual benefit to which she had not been entitled under her original contract.
In Keeley v Fosroc International Ltd [2006] IRLR 961, the Court of Appeal held that a provision for enhanced redundancy payments set out in a staff handbook that was incorporated into the employment contract constituted an express term of the individual contract of employment, thus conferring a contractual right to the payment.
In Solectron Scotland Ltd v Roper and others [2004] IRLR 4 EAT, the Employment Appeal Tribunal held that the employment tribunal did not err in finding that enhanced redundancy terms over and above what was paid to the applicants on their dismissal, which formed part of their contracts of employment with their previous employer, BT, and to which they were entitled by virtue of the Transfer of Undertakings Regulations 1981, had not been removed by custom or practice.
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In Albion Automotive Ltd v Walker and others, the Court of Appeal upholds an employment tribunal's decision that an employer who made enhanced redundancy payments according to an agreed policy for a number of years created a custom and practice from which the tribunal could infer that the employer and/or its successors intended to be contractually bound to make those payments.
In Quinn and others v Calder Industrial Materials Ltd the EAT upholds an industrial tribunal's ruling that the employer was not in breach of contract by failing to make enhanced redundancy payments to redundant employees.
An employee who agreed to relocate but later decided not to move was not dismissed by reason of redundancy, but rather because of his intention not to comply with the relocation clause in his contract, holds the EAT in Richardson and another v Applied Imaging International Ltd.
An employer had no right to withdraw unilaterally its employees' contractual entitlement to enhanced redundancy payments, holds the High Court in Lee and others v GEC Plessey Telecommunications.
In Allsop v North Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council [1992] 90 LGR 462 CA, the Court of Appeal held that payments made to employees by a local authority as compensation for redundancy under a voluntary severance scheme were unlawful as they exceeded the prescribed limits.
In Ross v Delrosa Caterers Ltd [1981] ICR 393 EAT, the Employment Appeal Tribunal held that, although continuity of employment is broken where a redundancy payment has been paid to an employee and the contract of employment is renewed or the employee re-engaged under a new contract, this is the case only if the redundancy payment is a statutory redundancy payment.
Employment law cases: HR and legal information and guidance relating to redundancy payments.