Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Tesco Stores v Element [2025] EAT 112: partial appeal; ET’s ‘reasonable employer’ approach unlawful; risk and fact findings unsafe; training materials’ weight upheld in equal pay comparators case

Published on: 05 August 2025

Published by a Law360 reporter

Legal News

Article summary

At the EAT, Judge Mary Stacey accepted several submissions advanced by Tesco in its protracted battle over an equal pay claim affecting 55,000 employees. The appeal concerned a demanding evidence-gathering exercise in which the tribunal had to determine whether two roles were comparable and what proof was adequate to support that conclusion. The EAT judge sided with Tesco and found that the Employment Tribunal (ET) had fallen into a number of errors when assessing how to compare the roles of female shop staff with those of better-paid men working in distribution centres. The men operated as the comparators in the case. One such mistake, the EAT said, was the ET’s decision to exclude certain performance targets from the assessment of job value on the basis that they were ‘unreasonable’. However, Stacey J held that it is not for an ET to rule on the reasonableness of an employer’s requirements. The proper question is what, in practice, the employer required workers to do...

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