Home / How to assess an injury to feeling award: Eddie Stobart Ltd v Graham [2025] EAT
28th February 2025
James Howarth, Associate
The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has recently provided a judgement regarding the application of the Vento band guidelines (which originally arose from the Court of Appeal case of Vento v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police). The guidelines established the basis for calculating injury to feeling awards at Tribunal and comprise of three bands of potential awards – lower (£1,200 to £11,700), middle (£11,700 to £35,200), and upper (£35,200 to £58,700). These bands are increased annually in April. Which band applies dramatically varies the amount of compensation available to a claimant so it is important to understand how they apply. The EAT’s judgment in Eddie Stobart Ltd v Graham [2025] EAT helps with this understanding, and is a useful case for employers trying to defend such claims.
The Claimant commenced employment in July 2021 as a planner at Eddie Stobart, and after around 10 months service, she announced she was pregnant. Separately, Eddie Stobart decided to reorganise its planning function in March 2022, and commenced consultation with its 9 planners, of which the Claimant was one, with a view to moving to 4 Transport Shift Managers. This would result in 5 redundancies.
During this consultation, the Claimant (correctly) asserted her legal right to be offered suitable alternative employment during maternity leave, in preference to other potentially redundant employees.
It was the Claimant’s view that the newly created role of Transport Shift Manager, was a suitable alternative to her role. Eddie Stobart disagreed, and believed the role not to be suitable, and that she therefore ought to participate in the consultation process, something that required her to participate in a competitive interview. The Claimant was unsuccessful in her interview and not offered one of these new roles. She was instead made redundant. The Claimant went on maternity leave shortly before the decision was made.
The Claimant raised a grievance about the decision, however due to an IT error, it was not actioned by Eddie Stobart. It was accepted that Eddie Stobart was aware of the grievance, however due to an issue with their firewall security system, it was not formally received.
In July 2022, the Claimant brought proceedings against Eddie Stobart alleging that she had been automatically unfairly dismissed, as well as suffering detrimental treatment and victimisation.
The Claimant failed with her unfair dismissal claim, with the Tribunal deciding that the Transport Shift Manager was not a suitable alterative role. It also rejected her victimisation claim. The Tribunal did however, uphold her complaints of detrimental treatment, finding that Eddie Stobart had failed to take sufficient steps to deal with her grievance. The Respondent was aware of a grievance being raised, however did not take adequate steps to find out about it, something that appeared to be linked to the Claimant being on maternity leave. It was a detriment, as the Claimant was not afforded the opportunity to have her grievance dealt with.
Given the Claimant was successful in part of her claim, she was awarded £10,000 in compensation for injury to feelings due to the detrimental conduct. This award was in the lower end of the middle Vento band at the time the judgement was made. The Tribunal found that the Claimant had been upset in the way that Eddie Stobart had dealt with the redundancy (which was deemed fair) and her grievance.
Eddie Stobart appealed the decision on remedy to the EAT, believing that the decision to award £10,000 in the circumstances was so excessive that it was perverse.
The EAT agreed and decided that the award was perverse in that little to no evidence was provided by the Claimant as to how the conduct of her employer had caused her injury to feelings. The EAT decided that Eddie Stobart’s failure was procedural in nature and limited in both scope and impact. The EAT therefore could not see how a middle Vento band award was attributed to Eddie Stobart’s actions.
The EAT instead, reduced the award to £2,000, being a lower end lower Vento band award.
Conclusion
Helpfully, the EAT provided some narrative as to how it came to its decision in relation to the application of the Vento bands. Commonly, the relevant banding depends on the frequency and duration of the discriminatory conduct, with one off occurrences more likely to be lower band, whereby campaigns of conduct upper band. The EAT in this case however made it clear that this should not be the only measure that should determine the banding.
Other factors will include whether the discrimination was overt, the existence of ridicule, disempowerment or exposure and whether the discrimination exposes an asymmetry of power, influence or information.
Although the EAT accepted a greater degree of injury arose here, due to the Claimant being on maternity leave at the time, her employer not actioning her grievance was evidently a one-off action, and not something necessarily done overtly due to the issue with their firewall. The redundancy itself was accepted as fair. The EAT further noted that the Claimant had managed to mitigate her loss by obtaining alternative employment almost immediately after leaving Eddie Stobart.
Bearing this in mind, if you are a claimant bringing a claim that could attract an injury to feeling award, then you need to evidence the injury suffered. The following should be gathered to evidence this suffering:
If you are an employer defending a claim that could attract an injury to feeling award, then it is important to challenge the evidence provided by a claimant to justify the remedy sought. It is not uncommon for claimants to try and pitch their remedy too high at the outset, and for it to not be in keeping with a realistic valuation of their claim. Remedy awards can often seem arbitrary, so it is important for employers to challenge how remedy is calculated by claimants.
Often employers will, for understandable reasons, focus mainly on the defence and evidential narrative to rebut the claim. However, you can lose at Tribunal, and it is just as important to be in a position to try and mitigate any losses if that is the case.
If you think you have a claim against your employer, or you are defending a claim against an employee please contact our team on 0161 832 3434 or email info@kuits.com.