This case raised an issue about whether the EJ was right to hold that financial information contained within management documents produced by the Respondent airline between April and July 2020 for the purposes of decision-making which led to a redundancy exercise in which the claimant pilots were dismissed was relevant to the claimants’ claims in the sense of CPR 31.6. The Respondent appealed against the disclosure of this document.

The EAT dismissed the appeal. The question of relevance of a document for the purposes of CPR 31.6 was not a matter of case management discretion. However, the Judge had directed herself correctly and reached the correct conclusion because the redacted material was likely to affect the parties’ cases on the disputed issues on the pleadings, namely what criteria for selection the Respondent had used, whether they were fair and, the extent to which they could be justified as being a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim in the indirect sex and age discrimination cases