The ‘Range of Reasonable Responses’ test: A Poor ‘Substitution’ for the Statutory Language

Abstract

The ‘range of reasonable responses’ (RORR) test for assessing the fairness of a dismissal under section 98(4) ERA 1996 started life as a mistake and never recovered. Where the statute tells judges a dismissal is unfair if an employer acted ‘unreasonably’, the RORR tells them this refers to a special kind of ‘employer reasonableness’. In a setting where the only question is whether a dismissal is too harsh or not it is senseless to ask anyone, including a judge, to behave as if a dismissal they consider too harsh is nevertheless not too harsh. Yet this is what the RORR has always asked Employment Tribunal judges to do, with predictable results. Because they are told that they may not use their own idea of what counts as reasonable, they have no choice but to assume that ‘employer reasonableness’ tolerates more harshness than ‘reasonableness’. Lady Hale, possibly viewing the matter in the same light, appears to have invited a Supreme Court challenge to the RORR in Reilly v Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council. This article argues that the Supreme Court must do away with the RORR because it artificially makes it harder to succeed in an unfair dismissal claim, it is doctrinally confused, and incremental efforts by the lower courts to resolve these problems within the RORR framework inevitably fail. The answer must involve distinguishing between a ‘standard for decision’ and a ‘standard of review’. The RORR tried to perform both functions by distorting the standard for decision to address standard of review concerns. Recent Supreme Court case law on proportionality, however, has made it clear this is the wrong approach. What the Court should install, in place of the RORR, is (a) a clear standard for decision, not subject to modification over standard of review concerns, and (b) targeted guidance about how tribunals should focus their inquiry and where to give deference to employers