Miss L CHENG v Cognition Communications Ltd — 2019

Miss L Cheng worked for Cognition Communications Limited as a Social Media Manager from 21 January 2019 until 31 May 2019. Her probation had been extended and, by May 2019, the respondent had decided to end the employment relationship. At the 23 May 2019 meeting, Mr Witcherley told her she was dismissed and also offered an additional month's salary, described as a goodwill payment. The tribunal preferred Mr Witcherley's evidence that the offer was conditional on orderly handover and professional conduct, and found that the parties' dispute turned on whether those conditions had been communicated and then complied with.

The tribunal accepted that after leaving, the claimant deleted 24 files from the respondent's Google Drive Clients Folder, including a document called JLRE Strategy and the Cognition Social Plan. It rejected the claimant's explanation that she had only deleted material from her own folder, and found that she had deliberately deleted the files and probably did so spitefully after dismissal. On that basis, the tribunal found that the claimant breached the condition attached to the promised extra month's pay, so the respondent's obligation to make that payment never arose.

The claim for holiday pay had been agreed and was withdrawn, and the judgment records it as dismissed upon withdrawal. The breach of contract claim therefore failed, and the alternative unlawful deduction from wages claim also failed because the sum was not properly payable under section 13 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 given the conditional nature of the promise. The tribunal noted, without deciding the point, that the claimant may have had a county court remedy if her statutory one week's notice had not been paid.