Have you ever seen an ET Schedule of Loss?

We have had an enquiry regarding what level of compensation the Claimant would likely to have received in our mock tribunal.

In this scenario, we have drawn up a draft schedule of loss as this would be produced in proceedings to set out what the claimant values their compensation to be. A copy of this can be found attached (this has been drawn up for illustrative purposes and in practice can be much more complex).

Within this document is the basic award (which is calculated in the same way as a statutory redundancy payment), which is based on the claimant’s weekly gross pay, age whilst working for the employer and length of service. All claimant’s who are successful in unfair dismissal claims are entitled to this award. In addition to the basic award is the compensatory award.

The compensatory award is calculated based on any losses incurred up to the tribunal date (we have said this was 12 weeks, but this would likely be longer in an actual claim) and also any future losses. In this scenario, the future losses have been calculated on the basis the claimant would be out of work for 6 months.

There are also deductions – we have assumed the claimant would be paid some form of benefits and these figures have been inputted in as mitigation.

We have therefore for the purpose of this scenario, valued the claim at £18,432.52. However, in this claim the value was to be reduced by 33% due to contributory fault (that is the claimant’s behaviour contributed to his dismissal – he did not follow banking procedures, he wrongly delegated tasks and he left the meeting early ). Therefore, on this basis the value of the claim would be reduced to £12,349.79.

This could also potentially be reduced further if the defence successfully argued for a Polkey Reduction – that is that the employee would have been fairly dismissed if a correct procedure had been followed. If the tribunal agreed with this, then this could further reduce any compensation, even up to 100%.

We also had a query about what would happen if Mr Hindes was not given a contract (in this scenario he was provided with one but had lost it so it would not be applicable here). If this is the case, then an additional award of 2-4 weeks pay (weekly pay capped at £508) can also be made.