In Central & North West London NHS Foundation Trust v Abimbola EAT/0542/08, the EAT held that the employment tribunal had wrongly excluded highly relevant factors from its consideration of whether or not it was practicable to order reinstatement following a finding of unfair dismissal.
In Sehmi v Gate Gourmet London Ltd; Sandhu and others v Gate Gourmet London Ltd EAT/0264/08 & EAT/0265/08, the EAT held that, while the withdrawal by an employee of his or her labour will not necessarily justify dismissal, in a situation where large numbers of employees deliberately absent themselves from work in a manner that is liable to do serious damage to the employer's business, dismissal of those taking part in the action will be reasonable, even where the absence is not prolonged.
In Bournemouth University Higher Education Corporation v Buckland EAT/0492/08, the EAT held that the well-established contractual test for determining whether or not constructive dismissal has occurred should not be embellished by the introduction of the range of reasonable responses test, a concept that is properly confined to the law of unfair dismissal. In doing so, it declined to follow the EAT decisions in Abbey National plc v Fairbrother and Claridge v Daler Rowney Ltd.
In Rolls-Royce plc v Unite [2009] EWCA Civ 387 CA, the Court of Appeal held that a redundancy selection matrix set out in a 2003 collective agreement was not automatically rendered unlawful following the implementation of the age discrimination legislation in 2006.