Iceland Frozen Foods Ltd v Jones

Ratio Decidendi

Fapte

Mr Jones worked a night shift for Iceland Frozen Foods. He was dismissed after he was found to have left his post and was suspected of the unauthorised removal or consumption of the company's frozen food. The employer treated this as a serious disciplinary matter and dismissed him. The industrial tribunal, applying its own assessment of what it would have done in the employer's position, found that dismissal was too harsh a sanction and held the dismissal unfair. The employer appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, arguing that the tribunal had wrongly substituted its own view for that of a reasonable employer.

Rezumatul hotărârii

The Employment Appeal Tribunal, in a judgment of Browne-Wilkinson J, allowed the appeal and remitted the case, holding that the tribunal had fallen into the classic error of substituting its own view for that of the employer. He set out authoritative guidance on the correct approach to what is now section 98(4) of the Employment Rights Act 1996: (1) the tribunal must start from the words of the statute; (2) it must consider the reasonableness of the employer's conduct, not simply whether the tribunal itself thinks the dismissal was fair; (3) in doing so the tribunal must not substitute its own decision as to what was the right course to adopt; (4) in many (though not all) cases there is a 'band of reasonable responses' to the employee's conduct within which one employer might reasonably take one view and another quite reasonably take another; and (5) the function of the tribunal is to decide whether the employer's decision to dismiss fell within that band — if it did, the dismissal is fair; if it fell outside it, the dismissal is unfair. This 'range (or band) of reasonable responses' test remains the cornerstone of unfair-dismissal law and was later approved by the Court of Appeal in Foley v Post Office; HSBC v Madden [2000].

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