JONASZ SKORSKI v Cronimet (great Britain) Limited — 2019

Jonasz Skorski was employed from 18 February 2008 until 5 June 2019 and worked as a Yard Supervisor. In early 2019 he was given additional weighbridge duties and received only limited informal training. The tribunal found that on 12 March 2019 a gamma alert was treated by colleagues as a background error, and that on 21 and 22 March 2019 further alarms sounded while he was working in the weighbridge office; he turned the alarms off and did not alert his line manager.

The respondent dismissed him for gross negligence after a disciplinary process led by Mr Parr. The tribunal accepted that Mr Parr genuinely believed the claimant had committed misconduct and that there were reasonable grounds to find he had failed to report the alarms. It also accepted that the investigation, though limited on the issue of training, just exceeded the threshold of reasonableness.

The claim nevertheless succeeded because the tribunal held that dismissal was outside the band of reasonable responses in the overall circumstances. It found there had been insufficient training and instruction about the importance of radiation scanning, no written record of training, and no adequate explanation to the claimant that failure to deal with a radiation alarm could amount to gross misconduct. The tribunal considered that a warning, rather than dismissal, would have been the fair response to this first disciplinary offence.

On remedy, the tribunal held that the claimant contributed to his dismissal because he should have alerted his line manager, and reduced both the basic and compensatory awards by 50%. It calculated a pre-reduction basic award of £4,849.46 and a compensatory award of £7,049.51, made up of £6,082.43 loss of earnings, £667.08 unpaid holiday pay, and £300 for loss of statutory rights. The pre-reduction total was £11,898.97, and the final award was £5,949.49.