Employment Tribunals Have No Jurisdiction in Job Evaluation Disputes

In dismissing claims for wrongful deductions from pay, brought by local authority employees, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) declined jurisdiction to carry out a comparative evaluation of their jobs on the basis that to perform such a subjective task would be to put itself in place of the employer (Kingston Upon Hull City Council v Schofield & Others).



Three employees who worked in the social care and health service department of Kingston Upon Hull City Council had made claims under the Employment Rights Act 1996 (ERA) on the basis that, in the course of a reorganisation, their jobs were incorrectly evaluated so that they were placed in the wrong pay grade and their salaries reduced.



An Employment Judge had declined to strike out the employees’ claims. However, in allowing the Council’s appeal against that ruling, the EAT decided that the exercise of job evaluation, or assessing whether or not such evaluations had been properly performed, was not an issue of fact that the Employment Tribunal (ET) would have jurisdiction to resolve.



The employees’ claims were for damages, not for sums which were ascertained or ascertainable by resolution of an issue of fact, and the ET would have no jurisdiction to ‘put itself in the place of the employer’ in attempting to carry out the exercise of comparing the value of one job as against another for the purposes of determining a claim under Section 13 of the ERA.