An Employment Tribunal found that a 54-year-old employee did not suffer age discrimination despite being made redundant 12 weeks before being able to access his pension.
Facts
Mr Singh worked as a Deputy Director on secondment to ‘Inprint and Design Limited’. Significant changes to the structure of Inprint and Design Limited were required for financial reasons. Mr Speight, who had responsibility for making the necessary changes, decided the Deputy Director role was an unaffordable “luxury”.
On 1 May 2018 Mr Singh had an individual consultation meeting with Mr Speight and an HR officer. In this meeting he was informed that his role and other roles were at risk of redundancy. When the redundancy process was started, he was 10 months short of his 55th birthday when he would have been able to access his pension scheme.
On 8 June 2018 the decision was made to terminate Mr Singh’s employment. Mr Singh filed a grievance and appealed the decision on 12 June 2018. Neither the grievance nor the appeal were upheld, and Mr Singh submitted a claim of unfair dismissal and age discrimination. He alleged age discrimination as, at the date of dismissal, he was 12 weeks away from being able to access his final salary pension scheme.
Decision
Regarding the claim of age discrimination, the Employment Tribunal (ET) unanimously decided that there was a genuine redundancy situation and Mr Singh was not individually targeted. They agreed that the post of Deputy Director was no longer needed and so the redundancy was genuine and had “nothing whatsoever to do with the respondent wanting to avoid him accessing his pension”. Although the timing of his eventual dismissal fell only 12 weeks before Mr Singh would have been able to access his pension, the initial consultation process had begun more than 6 months earlier. The ET concluded that there was no age discrimination as the timing of his dismissal had “everything to do with making costs savings the respondent had to make”.
The full judgment is available here.
Mr G Singh v Bradford College and Inprint & Design Ltd: 1809893/2018