Ms P Piredda v General Optical Council Heard via CVP (London Central) — 2025

The claimant, Ms P Piredda, worked for the General Optical Council as a Registration Officer from 2 May 2023. The tribunal found that she did not have a full grasp of the respondent's IT systems and that several of her complaints arose from misunderstandings about audit history, the public register, and file storage on her laptop and OneDrive. It also found that the respondent's public-facing register was not affected by the issues on the claimant's laptop, and that an internal investigation later found no evidence of tampering with registrant data.

The tribunal considered five alleged protected disclosures said to have been made between 9 and 15 August 2023. Applying the statutory test in ERA 1996 s.43B and the authorities it cited, including Williams v Brown, Kilraine v London Borough of Wandsworth, Chesterton Global Ltd v Nurmohamed, and Korashi, it held that none of the five amounted to protected disclosures. In each case, the tribunal found that the claimant was reporting or querying local IT or workflow issues, or had misunderstood what she had seen on the system, and that she had not identified a reasonable belief that a legal obligation was being breached or that any such belief was in the public interest.

The tribunal then addressed seven alleged detriments under s.47B ERA 1996. It rejected each allegation, finding that slower feedback was explained by team pressures and holiday absence, that the claimant had received training about specialty applications, that there was feedback during the relevant period, that no request for training had been shown, that comments about PSA guidelines were directed at errors rather than a protected disclosure, that the checking issue repeated earlier allegations, and that the probation meeting and dismissal process were about performance rather than misconduct or whistleblowing.

On dismissal, the tribunal found that the claimant was terminated after a probation review because her performance was below the standard expected and there was no indication it would improve. It accepted that Daniel Hall had concerns about the number of errors and about the time the claimant spent analysing IT issues, but found that these were not the reason for dismissal in the statutory sense. The appeal officer upheld the dismissal on the basis of underperformance, and the tribunal dismissed both the detriment claim and the automatic unfair dismissal claim.