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10 June 2011 / John McMullen
Issue: 7469 / Categories: Features , Employment
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Adopting the right course

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John McMullen reflects on what’s reasonable in unfair dismissal cases

It has long been settled law that when deciding whether a dismissal is fair or unfair, an employment tribunal should consider the reasonableness of the employer’s conduct and not whether it considers the dismissal to be fair.

The tribunal must not substitute its own view as to what is the right course to adopt for that of the employer. In many, although not all, cases there is a band of reasonable responses to the employee’s conduct or other situation facing the employer within which one employer might take one view and another, quite reasonably, another. If a dismissal falls within the band it is fair. If it falls outside the band it is unfair.

Iceland Frozen Foods v Jones

This canon was laid down by the seminal EAT case of Iceland Frozen Foods Limited v Jones [1982] IRLR 439 (per Browne-Wilkinson P, applying dicta of Lord Denning MR in British Leyland (UK) Ltd v Swift [1981] IRLR 91, CA).

Some 20 years

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