R (Seymour-Smith) v Secretary of State for Employment
| R (Seymour Smith) v SS for Employment | |
|---|---|
| Court | House of Lords, European Court of Justice |
| Full case name | R v Secretary of State for Employment, ex parte Seymour-Smith and Perez |
| Citation(s) | [2000] UKHL 12 |
| Case history | |
| Prior action(s) | (1999) C-167/97 (ECJ), [1997] UKHL 11 (HL), [1995] IRLR 464 (CA) and [1994] IRLR 448 (HC) |
| Case opinions | |
| Lord Slynn, Lord Goff, Lord Jauncey, Lord Nicholls and Lord Steyn | |
| Keywords | |
| Two year qualifying period, unfair dismissal, indirect discrimination | |
R (Seymour-Smith) v Secretary of State for Employment [2000] UKHL 12 and (1999) C-167/97 is a landmark case in UK labour law and European labour law on the qualifying period of work before an employee accrues unfair dismissal rights. It was held by the House of Lords and the European Court of Justice that a two-year qualifying period had a disparate impact on women given that significantly fewer women worked long enough to be protected by the unfair dismissal law, but that the government could, at that point in the 1990s, succeed in an objective justification of increasing recruitment by employers.
Ms Nicole Seymour-Smith and Ms Perez had made a claim against the Secretary of State for Employment that the United Kingdom's qualifying period of two years for unfair dismissal constituted indirect discrimination against women under the Treaty of the European Union, article 119 (now TFEU art 157) and the Equal Treatment Directive 76/207/EEC. Ms Seymour-Smith was dismissed after less than a year's work in 1991 for Christo & Co, and Ms Perez had similarly claimed unfair dismissal after losing her job at Matthew Stone Restoration. Statistically fewer women had long enough periods of service as men to accrue the protection of unfair dismissal law, for data collected between 1985 and 1991 when Ms Seymour-Smith was working. (There was evidence that after that time the gap had been starting to narrow.) The UK qualifying period resulted from the Unfair Dismissal (Variation of Qualifying Period) Order 1985, which had raised the qualifying period for all employees from its original period of one year under the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1978 section 64(1).
Elias QC represented the government and Allen QC represented the employees. Before the conclusion of the litigation, in 1999, the newly elected Labour government reduced the qualifying period for unfair dismissal from two years to one year, currently found in the Employment Rights Act 1996 section 108.
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