EAT Unfair Dismissal: Reason for Dismissal Including Substantial Other Reason – UNFAIR DISMISSAL – Constructive dismissal
CONTRACT OF EMPLOYMENT – Implied term/variation/construction of term
An employee resigned, giving a number of grounds for doing so in her letter of resignation. She claimed she had been constructively dismissed, and that the principal ground for this was that she had made a protected disclosure. The Employment Tribunal accepted she had made such a disclosure, and had suffered detriment because of it, but rejected her claim that the dismissal was principally for that reason. It nonetheless held that she had been entitled to resign, and upheld her claim of unfair dismissal. The employer appealed against this conclusion, arguing that of the seven matters which the Claimant alleged had been breaches of contract toward her, those which she regarded as most serious were found by the Tribunal to be no breaches. As to the other grounds, it was held on appeal that the Tribunal did not set out its reasoning sufficiently on most of them, but it remained unchallenged that incidents on 17 February 2014 had been in part a reason for her resignation. A submission that they might not have been repudiatory, taken on their own, was rejected: in context, any court would have held them to be so. An argument that the resignation would have happened anyway, if the breach had not occurred, and that therefore there should have been no finding of constructive dismissal, was rejected: this was in effect to reinstate a test that a repudiatory breach established by an employee as the reason for her dismissal had to be the effective or principal reason for resigning, and that was not the law (applying Wright v Ayrshire). The appeal was dismissed.
Langstaff P J
[2015] UKEAT 0106 – 15 – 2107
Bailii
England and Wales
Employment
Updated: 04 January 2022; Ref: scu.552421