Mrs J Stephens v Rainbow Therapeutic Limited — 2019

The claimant worked for Rainbow Therapeutic Limited from 20 December 2015 until her dismissal on 13 December 2017. She brought claims for automatic unfair dismissal on the basis of protected disclosures and, alternatively, ordinary unfair dismissal. The tribunal accepted that the first disclosure about Child A was a protected disclosure, and found on the balance of probabilities that a second disclosure about Child B was also made and was protected, but held that neither disclosure was the reason or principal reason for dismissal.

The tribunal found that the dismissal decision was made by Mr Doyle alone. It concluded that he was not shown to have been aware of the Child B disclosure in a way that influenced him, and that there was no evidence he or others were seeking to engineer the claimant's exit because she had complained. The tribunal also found no basis to attribute any improper motive to Mr Hicks under the principles in Royal Mail Group Ltd v Jhuti. The protected disclosure claim was therefore dismissed.

On the ordinary unfair dismissal claim, the tribunal first held that the respondent had not proved gross misconduct so as to deny the claimant a week's statutory notice, which meant she had the qualifying service needed to bring the claim. On the merits, however, it found that Mr Doyle dismissed the claimant because he genuinely believed she had pushed Child C, that he had reasonable grounds for that belief, and that the investigation was reasonable in all the circumstances. Applying section 98(4) ERA 1996 and the Burchell test, the tribunal held that the dismissal was within the band of reasonable responses and dismissed the unfair dismissal claim.