Ms J Jiang v SOAS University of London — 2025

Ms J Jiang worked for SOAS University of London as a Marie Curie Research Fellow from 16 September 2022 until her dismissal on 19 October 2023. The tribunal found that Professor Graeme Were dismissed her for a breakdown in trust and confidence described as SOSR after repeated requests for evidence of research progress were not met, the European Commission funder was pressing for updates, and the respondent had been unable to secure a replacement supervisor acceptable to the claimant. The tribunal also found that Professor Were was kept in ignorance of the grievance, protected disclosure, and related issues when he made the dismissal decision.

On the whistleblowing complaints, the tribunal held that none of the alleged disclosures were qualifying protected disclosures. It accepted that the claimant genuinely believed the 28 July 2023 grievance about a fabricated ethics certificate raised public-interest issues, but found that belief was not reasonable because she had made no enquiry between 7 June 2023 and 28 July 2023 and had no evidential basis beyond suspicion. Later disclosures on 30 August 2023 and 19 October 2023 repeated the same allegation without any further factual basis, so they also failed. The tribunal treated several earlier detriment allegations as out of time under section 48 ERA 1996, unless part of a continuing act.

The tribunal found some detriments in principle, including the delay in notifying the claimant of the grievance outcome until 21 December 2023, the absence of an appeal procedure, and the later payment delay for mobility and London allowance. However, it held that the protected disclosures were at most a trivial cause, or not a cause at all, of those matters. It rejected the teaching-related allegations, the September 2023 payroll omission as a protected-disclosure detriment, and the complaint about the dismissal itself as a detriment because dismissal was addressed under section 103A. The holiday pay complaint was not pursued. The unlawful deduction from wages claim failed because the September salary omission was an administrative payroll error corrected the same day, and no further contractual sums were proved; the respondent's later back-payment of mobility and London allowance on 30 April 2025 was not a tribunal award.