in person For the v Mr K Chehal – legal consultant — 2021

The claimant worked for the respondent for about five months as an area supervisor and was dismissed on 30 March 2020. The tribunal was concerned with whether the dismissal was automatically unfair because the claimant had raised health and safety concerns in the context of the emerging COVID-19 lockdown, when he was asked to collect cleaning equipment from a school and then take it to his manager's home while she and her daughter were self-isolating with suspected COVID symptoms.

The tribunal preferred the claimant's account of the 30 March telephone discussion. It found that he had queried whether the collection and delivery arrangements were safe, and that his challenge to the proposed arrangement led to the call ending and the manager promptly seeking authority to dismiss him. The tribunal rejected the respondent's denial that COVID was discussed, finding the respondent's evidence contradictory and less reliable than the claimant's near-contemporaneous written accounts.

On that evidence, the tribunal held that dismissal was at least for the principal reason that the claimant had raised concerns about his health and safety. It found that he reasonably believed the circumstances were harmful or potentially harmful to health and safety, and that he was taking appropriate steps to protect himself from danger in circumstances he reasonably believed to be serious and imminent. Judgment was therefore entered for automatic unfair dismissal contrary to s.100(1)(c) and/or (e) Employment Rights Act 1996.

At remedy, the claimant sought one year's net loss of earnings. The respondent accepted his weekly net pay at £320, making a year-long loss £16,640. The tribunal rejected the respondent's mitigation argument, applying the principle that the burden lies on the employer to show a failure to mitigate, and found that the claimant had made sufficient efforts to find work in the pandemic conditions. It therefore awarded £16,640 subject to any recoupment of benefits.