Read on for our monthly digest for employers on upcoming employment law changes and key, recent employment tribunal cases.
Alternative Employment in Redundancy
Hendy Group v Kennedy
In Hendy Group Ltd v Kennedy [2024] EAT 106 the claimant, Mr Kennedy, had worked for the Hendy car dealership chain since 2013 and, after more than a decade in frontline sales, moved into a training manager role in 2015.
When the pandemic reduced training demand, the post was placed at risk and Mr Kennedy accepted that both the redundancy situation and his selection were genuine.
During a seven-week notice period, however, the employer simply directed him to its public vacancies page, reclaimed his laptop so he lost access to the intranet, failed to alert recruiting managers that he was at risk and even told him that any further applications for sales roles would be rejected.
The employment tribunal held that this lack of proactive assistance, as well as the active blocking of credible applications, made the dismissal unfair and awarded him his full losses with no Polkey reduction.
On 6 June 2025 the Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld that ruling, describing Hendy Group’s approach as one that no reasonable employer would have adopted.
Employer Takeaways
The decision makes it clear that a fair redundancy exercise involves more than publishing a vacancy list to satisfy the suitable alternative employment requirement. Where suitable roles exist, employers have to take positive steps to match at-risk staff to alternatives, such as keeping them connected to internal recruitment systems, giving practical help with applications and ensuring hiring managers know that redeployment candidates are available.
Treating a long-serving employee as an external applicant, withdrawing their IT access or actively discouraging applications would fall outside the range of reasonable responses and expose the business to an unfair dismissal finding.
To minimise that risk, organisations should embed a structured redeployment process: maintain vacancy registers that remain accessible to affected staff, assign HR or line manager support to discuss suitability and training needs, record every role considered (with reasons if rejected) and communicate the employee’s availability across the business.
Territorial & International Jurisdiction
Prahl, Hofvenstam & Ågeback v Lapinski
Lapinski, formerly a member of Triton Investment Advisers LLP in London, issued Equality Act 2010 discrimination proceedings in August 2022 against the LLP and three Stockholm-based colleagues. The Swedish respondents argued that an English employment tribunal lacked international jurisdiction because they lived and worked exclusively in Sweden, were served only at their Stockholm business address and had never set foot in the UK in connection with the claim.
The Employment Judge rejected that objection, and on 12 June 2025 the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) upheld the tribunal’s ruling. His Honour Judge Auerbach held that the tribunal had jurisdiction for four principal reasons.
First, the claims relied on the Equality Act, a statute whose territorial reach can extend abroad where there is a sufficiently strong connection with Great Britain under the Lawson v Serco test.
Second, the tribunal had complied with its own 2013 Rules by posting the claim form and notice of claim to the respondents in Sweden; those Rules form a self-contained code, so no additional High Court permission for overseas service was required.
Third, nothing in post-Brexit private international law principles displaced that conclusion. Indeed, section 15C of the amended Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982 preserves employee protection once afforded by the Brussels Recast Regulation and can, with “elasticity”, cover LLP members and their fellow agents.
Finally, allowing the same dispute to proceed piecemeal in different jurisdictions would defeat the Act’s purpose of avoiding multiple proceedings.
Employer Takeaways
The decision confirms that multinational employers and their overseas staff can be drawn into English employment tribunal litigation whenever a claimant shows both (i) a close territorial link to Great Britain and (ii) proper service under the tribunal’s procedural code.
Standard civil court rules on foreign service do not apply, and tribunals will read post-Brexit jurisdiction statutes liberally to ensure claimants are ‘no worse off’ than under the old EU regime.
For employers, this means that internal disputes involving UK entities or UK-based partners may expose colleagues abroad to direct personal liability even if they have never worked here.
HR and legal teams in international groups should therefore keep discrimination training and policies coordinated across borders, warn non-UK managers that they may be named personally in UK claims, and put in place group-wide protocols for receiving and responding to tribunal papers served overseas, because failure to engage will not bar the tribunal from hearing the claim.
Working From Home
Wicken v Akita Systems Ltd
Mr Wicken joined Kent-based IT services provider Akita Systems in 2014 and rose to technical director. In May 2022, amid a deteriorating relationship with the founder/managing director, Mr Boudet, he was asked to attend a face-to-face mediation meeting designed to repair relations. Wicken requested that the session be held on Microsoft Teams because he needed to stay at home to supervise building work in his garden. Although he ultimately went into the office, the request became a flash-point: Boudet told him he was not taking the process seriously and confidence in him plummeted.
Over the following weeks, Wicken was asked to draft an ‘improvement plan’, he was also told that the directors had “lost trust and confidence” in him and then saw his formal grievance handled by Mr Charity, a long-standing friend of the MD with no investigation experience. When Charity refused to step aside, Wicken took sick leave due to stress and resigned, alleging a fundamental breach of contract.
The London South Employment Tribunal held that Akita’s cumulative conduct, especially the biased grievance process, destroyed the implied term of trust and confidence and amounted to constructive unfair dismissal. Compensation of £30,692.35 was ordered, reflecting a 50 per cent Polkey reduction but a 15 per cent ACAS uplift for procedural failings.
The Tribunal Judge accepted that asking to work from home for personal reasons had been a mistake, yet found it was not “culpable or blameworthy” behaviour and could not justify the employer’s response.
Employer Takeaways
The ruling underlines that employees may raise legitimate flexible working or remote working requests, even at short notice, and must not be penalised merely because managers dislike the reason.
Where workplace relationships sour, any subsequent grievance or disciplinary investigation must be run by someone demonstrably independent. Appointing a close associate of the decision-maker is almost certain to be viewed as bias that breaches the implied duty of trust and confidence.
Employers should ensure that hybrid-working policies specify how ad-hoc requests will be treated and document the objective business reasons for any refusal. Above all, the case shows that a flawed grievance or mediation procedure can convert what would otherwise be a minor disagreement over remote working into a successful constructive dismissal claim.
Use of AI
R v. London Borough of Haringey (on the application of Frederick Ayinde)
On 6 June 2025, the High Court, sitting under its “Hamid” jurisdiction, delivered judgment in two linked references, R (Ayinde) v London Borough of Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank (QPSC) & QNB Capital LLC, after discovering that lawyers on both sides had relied on generative-AI output that cited authorities which either did not exist or radically mis-quoted genuine judgments.
The High Court held that presenting such “hallucinated” material was a serious abuse of process: counsel in Ayinde was ordered to pay wasted costs and was referred to the Bar Standards Board, while the claimant’s solicitor in Al-Haroun was referred to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
The Court stressed that, however useful AI might be, lawyers remain personally responsible for verifying every citation they put before a judge.
The matter returned to the Court of Appeal on 23 June 2025, not because the underlying housing and commercial claims were ready for appeal, but so that the senior court could consider the wider implications of AI misuse.
In a single judgment covering both cases, the Court of Appeal endorsed the High Court’s findings, described AI hallucinations as an emerging professional hazard and warned that the line between genuine and fabricated material is becoming ever harder to detect.
The judges accepted that even passive reliance on AI (for example, copying an unverified Google-generated summary) can amount to professional misconduct.
At the same time, the Court acknowledged that AI tools are now embedded in everyday practice and cannot realistically be banned, placing the onus on lawyers, and by extension their employers, to build robust verification safeguards.
Employer Takeaways
Employers should treat this line of authority as a clear reminder that the human beings in the organisation, not the technology, bear ultimate responsibility for the accuracy of work products. Any business that permits staff to use large-language-model tools needs written policies that require manual checking of references, quotations and data against primary sources before external release.
In-house legal and compliance teams should update their professional-conduct training so that the duty to verify AI outputs is explicit, trackable and reinforced by supervision records.
Firms that outsource tasks to external lawyers or consultants should seek contractual assurances that those providers are following similar verification protocols.
Finally, because courts and regulators are prepared to impose wasted-costs orders and make regulatory referrals where AI errors slip through, employers would be well advised to keep audit trails showing how any AI-assisted work was checked; such evidence may prove essential in mitigating liability if something does go wrong.
Need Assistance?
If you have a question about employment case law and the impact of tribunal and court decisions on your business, we can help. Working closely with our specialist human resource colleagues, we offer a holistic advisory and support service for employers encompassing both the legal and people risks of workforce management. Speak to our experts today for advice.
Author
Founder and Managing Director Anne Morris is a fully qualified solicitor and trusted adviser to large corporates through to SMEs, providing strategic immigration and global mobility advice to support employers with UK operations to meet their workforce needs through corporate immigration.
She is a recognised by Legal 500 and Chambers as a legal expert and delivers Board-level advice on business migration and compliance risk management as well as overseeing the firm’s development of new client propositions and delivery of cost and time efficient processing of applications.
Anne is an active public speaker, immigration commentator, and immigration policy contributor and regularly hosts training sessions for employers and HR professionals
