Academics made redundant by Leicester ‘unfairly dismissed’

Three academics who were made redundant by the University of Leicester were unfairly dismissed, a tribunal has ruled.

David Harvie, Geoffrey Lightfoot and Simon Lilley all left their roles in the university’s business school during a major restructuring programme in 2021 after their specialism of critical management studies and political economy was identified as “not being aligned” with the future strategy of the institution.

They made claims for unfair dismissal because they alleged that the redundancy process was unlawful because it had not been fair.

A judge at the Leicester Employment Tribunal has now ruled that these claims were well founded after a five-day hearing in late January. The trio will hear in June what compensation they may be entitled to.

Dr Harvie and Professor Lilley – who both had worked for the university for nearly two decades – submitted that while the law allowed the university to disinvest from research in their field of study and make redundancies owing to this decision, the selection process had been conducted in a “sloppy manner without a codified selection criteria or marking scheme and with unreliable information”.

Professor Lilley, now professor of organisational studies and management at the University of Lincoln, told Times Higher Education that the university had failed to implement “the simplest basics of redundancy law”.

“These are experienced organisations with large budgets and professional HR functions,” he said. “The bar for making somebody legally redundant in the UK is so low that if you can’t get over that, you really are not fit for the task you are employed to do.”

The hearing heard that, following a decision by the business school’s managers, the dean and the deputy dean of the school at the time, Jim Devlin and Dan Ladley, conducted a screening exercise to identify staff whose research aligned with the fields at risk but omitted the whole of the department of economics, finance and accounting.

Those whose research was identified as being primarily focused on critical management studies and political economy were placed in a pool for redundancy and were told that all would lose their jobs unless they could demonstrate that their research aligned with the school’s future direction. Eventually, nine academics were made redundant out of 16 initially placed in this pool.

Professor Ladley told the tribunal that placing all staff at risk of redundancy would have “caused unnecessary stress for staff” when there was already “sufficient knowledge of their research activity”.

The judge ruled that the screening exercise had been “in fact a selection process and that a reasonable employer would have viewed it as such and have consulted in advance of its use” and that concerns about stress were “not an acceptable reason” to conduct the process in this way.

Leicester’s case was further damaged by a lack of documentation – including no emails or notes of any meetings between the senior leaders – which led to the judge’s concluding that “it was not clear how that initial selection had been carried out”.

“This did not help in considering whether a fair process had been adopted and that the decision to dismiss was within the range of reasonable response,” the ruling says.

Professor Lilley – who, with colleagues, will publish a book about their experiences this summer – said academics were getting “cannier” about winning such cases and it showed the importance of challenging such processes.

A Leicester spokesperson said: “While we respect the findings of the tribunal, we are disappointed that an unfair dismissal claim was upheld. We will take time to review this judgment and explore the options available to us, including appeal, therefore do not want to comment further at this time.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com