The legal claim
The case concerned section 188 of the Trade Union & Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, according to Construction News. The payment covers the period in which consultation should have taken place before the employees lost their jobs.
Construction News reported that the cost of claims of this kind often falls on the taxpayer-funded Redundancy Payments Service. It placed the ruling among a series of similar cases involving construction businesses that have ceased trading in recent years.
The business and its rescue
ERV Group traded as Evoframes and supplied uPVC windows and doors. Its factory was in Livingston, Scotland, while its registered address was in Buckley, North Wales. The business was below the size threshold requiring it to publish detailed accounts.
Buckley-based Rooms & Views Manufacturing bought Evoframes out of administration in January 2024. High interest rates and rising costs had been cited as reasons for the earlier collapse.
Administrators Begbies Traynor, now known as BTG, said at the time that the acquisition had preserved 76 jobs. They also presented the sale as securing the business’s future. That assessment preceded the trading losses recorded in ERV Group’s later accounts.
Losses and creditor balances
ERV Group entered liquidation in February. A note in its last published accounts attributed the voluntary liquidation to losses from trading. The accounts of Rooms & Views Manufacturing, which had turnover of £8m, gave further detail: an attempt to sell ERV Group had failed after its trading performance fell short of sales expectations.
A statement of affairs filed at Companies House recorded £165,000 owed to former employees. It also listed £886,000 due to trade and expense creditors. These figures set out the company’s debts separately from the tribunal’s finding on redundancy consultation.
Across its liabilities, ERV Group owed £1.5m more than liquidators BTG estimated would be available to creditors. The shortfall was therefore measured against the liquidators’ assessment of available funds, rather than turnover.
Rooms & Views Manufacturing’s accounts also recorded a £487,000 provision for creditor balances. The accounts said these were sums the company was obliged to settle.