Russell v London Borough of Haringey IRLB 649 September 2000 CA

The selection of pools for redundancy is always a hotly contested area. In this case a worker argued that his job was interchangeable and that he therefore should not have been selected for redundancy. The Court of Appeal had to consider the effect of a job description requiring flexibility of a worker in relation to the drawing of the pool for potential redundancies.

Mr Russell was employed by the Council as Panel Administrator in the administrative section of the Children's Care Service. He was dismissed as redundant following the deletion of the post of Panel Administrator. His job description contained a general paragraph requiring him to provide cover for other administrative posts and to undertake other duties consistent with the objectives of his post. It was a fairly standard flexibility clause now found routinely in contracts and job descriptions.

The Council's redundancy procedure said "The identification of a unit or section for closure will not automatically result in the people who work within it being declared redundant Consideration will be given to whether the affected employees are interchangeable with other employees elsewhere in the organisationÉ Only if there is evidence that the employees are not interchangeable will they be declared redundant without any further selection".

Mr Russell complained of unfair dismissal and breach of contract. The Employment Tribunal found that he had been fairly dismissed and that as his "post was considered a specific unit, there was no need to apply a selection criteria". After losing in the EAT, he appealed to the Court of Appeal on "the interchangeability point".

The Court of Appeal considered that it could be inferred from all the circumstances that the Council's redundancy procedure was complied with. They commented that there was no evidence that the job of Panel Administrator was interchangeable, the post was not the same as any other post in the section, there were no other employees who carried out the function of the job, the requirement that Mr Russell could be contractually obliged to cover for other and he did other work to make up for the reduced value of his job did not make him interchangeable. Mr Russell's appeal failed.