OMG! When I found this I was amazed! Stupidly, because I am honest and straightforward and because I was brought up to respect experts in their field, I believed that the judge in my son's tribunal case must "know best". I represented him and whilst I am an HR Officer there is no doubt that in some areas relating to specific law I was a bit out of my depth. Basis of the case was that my son was a driver who lost his licence for 6m being drunk in charge (although technically he wasn't as he did not have the keys to the vehicle but his solicitor was useless and told him he HAD to plead guilty). There had been two other employees previously who had lost their licences for 3 years each and who had both been retained by the employer. My son had 5 years service and employer stated that he was a good employee. He was given alternative work and believed that this would continue until he retained his licence as he had not been told otherwise. There were redundancies going on at the time in the company and two months after the ban he was called to a staff meeting where they were told that they were at risk. Then the following week he was called to a meeting, having no prior knowledge of what it was about and dismissed for losing his licence! At the tribunal it came out that the person who dismissed was not even employed by the company and had no authority to do so, that he was only allowed 2 days to appeal even though their policy stated 5 days, that the decision to dismiss had been taken PRIOR to the hearing as he was handed the letter confirming it prior to the start of the meeting, that his boss had considered he should be "laid off" as he was last in to that section (redundancy???). His company did not call 3 witnesses who were crucial to the case, only he and the non employee attended. They both lied under oath and it was so obvious - they tied themselves up in knots in their evidence, contradicting what they had previously said and both were really uncomfortable under questionning, the non employee becoming sarcastic towards me during questionning. Hi employer lied by saying that he had always told my son that the position was temporary (he never did), there was no documentation to support anything he was saying and the documentation there was, was appalling! The non employee lied about things that were said at the "hearing" even though these were not contained in the submitted minutes of the meeting, she just added them on to try and discredit my son! We thought we had it sewn up. We were claiming unfair dismissal and redundancy and the associated payments. However the judge ignored much of the evidence. Although she (the judge) questionned the employer about the length of the ban v the length of service of a good employee and he said he never considered it, AND considering that after receipt of the ET1 they offered him his job back even though he had still not got his licence back AND his boss said he would bring him back on other duties until he did get his licence back - the judge said in summing up that they could not be expected to foresee how much work there might have been for him! UD was accepted and he got one weeks pay for breach of contract and 5 weeks basic award, all reduced by 50% under the Polkey principle as she said that my son would not have been in this situation if he had not lost his licence. The employers representative asked them to reconsider that as he said my son was 100% responsible for losing his licence so they sent us out again while they reconsidered but then decided that their original decision was correct as they considered that the loss of licence was 50% of the reason for the dismissal and the reduction in available work was the other 50%. However they awarded nothing for other losses since, i.e. my son found another job fairly quickly (a miracle in itself in this climate) but earns substantially less. There is so much more I could say but it was so obvious that the judge was on their side. At one point I apologised when I was picked up on something by the judge and stated that this was not my usual job and she said, "Oh really, we'd never have guessed", really sarcastically! I thought that they would take into account that I was a lay person but that doesn't seem to have happened. From a legal perspective I did not know how to argue the points regarding losses and just hoped they had it right. But considering that they have apportioned 50% of the dismissal to redundancy, should there have been more of an award? If anyone knows I would be grateful for a response.