Rowan v Machinery Installations (South Wales) Ltd: EAT 1981

The claimant was made redundant. He was given statutory redundancy pay, but continued from week to week for two years more. He was again made redundant but calculated only from the earlier date.
Held: Although paragraph 12 of Schedule 13 of the 1978 Act provided that the continuity of employment should be treated as broken where a redundancy payment had been paid to the employee, whether a redundancy payment had been paid within the meaning of paragraph 12 depended on the circumstances in which the payment was made. To amount to a redundancy payment it had to be made in circumstances in which the employer was liable to pay a sum under the redundancy provisions of the section; ‘redundancy payment’ must mean a statutory, not a voluntary redundancy payment.
Slynn J said: ‘If a sum of money is paid under the belief that a redundancy payment is due or for any other reason, but where there is no liability on the employer to make it as a redundancy payment, then it seems to us that subparagraph (a)(i) of subparagraph (2) of paragraph 12 is not satisfied, and accordingly no reliance can be placed upon the provisions of paragraph 12(1) that the period of employment is to be treated as having been broken.’

Judges:

Slynn J

Citations:

[1981] IRLR 122, [1981] ICR 386

Jurisdiction:

England and Wales

Cited by:

CitedLassman and Others v Secretary of State for Trade and Industry CA 19-Apr-2000
The claimants worked for Rotaprint when it went into receivership in 1988, and then for the receiver before being transferred to Pan Graphics. Statutory redundany payments were made on the receivership of Rotaprint. The claimants sought further . .
CitedSenior Heat Treatment Ltd v Bell and others EAT 20-Jun-1997
The employer appealed a finding as to the period of continuous employment of the claimants. Before a transfer of the undertaking to the employer, the former emloyer had paid redundancy payments to several employees, some whom in practice left to . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.

Employment

Updated: 07 May 2022; Ref: scu.270272