29 January 2010
£1.5 million in compensation awarded to employees of Atlas Holiday Homes Ltd
At the Hull Employment Tribunal Hearing on 29th January 2010, Judge Molyneux heard arguments from Miss Nathalie Stewart, employment solicitor at Myer Wolff Solicitors. She represented 93 of the 333 former employees of Atlas Holiday Homes Ltd in a claim for compensation for the failure of their employer to consult them before making them redundant.
On 17th December 2008, after the employees left for the day, many of them discovered on the news that they had in fact been made redundant. Letters from the company’s administrators followed asking them to attend meetings. They were told that they were redundant but the company was not in a position to pay them. Applications were made to the Redundancy Payments Office to recover some of their monies from the tax payer. However, the administration is ongoing and no further payments had been received.
We received instructions in March 2009 and advised an employee that an employer should not make an employee redundant without consulting with them first. In this case given the number of redundancies consultation should have been for a minimum of 90 days pursuant to s188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation Act) 1992. At this stage the trade union had told the employees to get independent legal advice and the employee was advised that we would make this claim on his behalf. We received a rush of instructions and eventually issued for 93 employees before the deadline was up, with dozens more contacting us after the deadline had passed.
Now more than a year after the redundancies, the employees finally received a Judgment condemning the employer for the way in which the redundancy was undertaken. The award of 90 days loss of earnings is the maximum award made for failure to consult and reflects the fact that the company failed in any way to consult or inform the employees about this.As a result of the Judgment the employees will be able again to claim part of their monies owed from the Redundancy Payments Office. However, the rest of the monies are still owed by the administrator and the administration is ongoing. The employees hope to receive the monies that they are owed at the end of the Administration but have no guarantee of this.
Nathalie said ‘The Judgment today provided a moral victory for the Atlas Holiday Homes Ltd employees and recognised that it is unlawful to make redundancies in the way that this company did, even if they are inevitable.’Click the links below to see more coverage of this story both on the BBC news website and with the Hull Daily Mail–