Jaguar Land Rover has been told to pay a former employee nearly £148,000 for unfair dismissal and discrimination after wrongly accusing him of not trying hard enough to find a new job.
The decision was made at a remedy hearing in July, which followed an earlier tribunal ruling that Mr Williams had been unfairly dismissed and discriminated against by Jaguar Land Rover.
Williams was employed by Jaguar Land Rover as a production operative from April 2014 to March 2020, the tribunal heard. When he was dismissed, he received £4,400 pay in lieu of notice.
The dismissal came during a period of mental health-related absence despite the claimant pointing out his health issues were almost resolved.
The remedy hearing had to decide how much compensation was due to Williams, if any, and whether he had taken suitable steps to replace his lost earnings at Jaguar Land Rover.
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It also had to take a view on whether Williams’ employment at the vehicle firm would have ended anyway, to what extent the discrimination had injured his feelings, and to what extent did he contribute to his own dismissal.
At the remedy hearing, Jaguar Land Rover argued for lower compensation on the grounds that Williams had not done enough to find alternative employment.
However, the tribunal heard that he had retrained as a plumber and, while on the one-year training course, looked for manufacturing work, seasonal employment and work as a plumber’s mate.
Employment judge Sara Woffenden ruled that Jaguar Land Rover should pay the claimant compensation for unfair dismissal and discrimination to the sum of £147,572.75.
Woffenden said: “We conclude that if he had not been dismissed he would have been back at work full time by 2 March 2020 and would have either been furloughed or continued working at the respondent during the pandemic.
“There is no evidence that his employment would have ended; he did not want to leave.”
The report added: “He felt worthless, sad and angry about losing his job and upset at being unable to provide for his daughter as he once had done.”
When the first Covid lockdown ended in July 2020, the tribunal heard Williams began to look for work but found nothing suitable or accessible given his parental responsibilities.
In September 2020, Williams began a one-year course to train as a plumber. He believed retraining was the best way to achieve salary parity with what he had been paid by the respondent.
According to the tribunal report, while Williams was on the plumbing course his ability to work was limited to “those part-time roles which would also accommodate his child care responsibilities for his daughter and to which he could travel on local transport in the absence of a driving licence”.
Degree of effort
Jaguar Land Rover’s representative at the hearings, Mr Perry, questioned the claimant about the degree of effort he had put into finding work – including at HS2, which had been advertising lots of roles in the area.
Williams said he lacked the necessary qualifications, nor the means to get to the site. He eventually began working as a self-employed plumber after completing his course.
Perry argued that there were plenty of vacancies between from March 2020 to June 2021 that Williams would have been a strong candidate for, but this was rejected in its entirety by the judge.
On 27 March 2023, Williams secured a full-time role as a heating and ventilation engineer and told the tribunal that he was “not yet earning the salary he was paid by the respondent and thinks it will take him about another year to do so”.
The judge said: “In our judgement the claimant has taken reasonable steps to minimise the losses suffered as a consequence of the unlawful act of dismissal as and when he was in a position to do so having regard to his personal circumstances (his previous experience in manufacturing, his inability to drive or to learn to drive, his childcare responsibilities and where he lived) set against the prevailing background of the Covid pandemic.
“His move to retrain at a time when his efforts to obtain work had been unsuccessful was not unreasonable nor were the steps he took after commencing training unreasonable,” said the judge.
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