Mr. Pubbi v Your-Move.co.uk Limited — 2020

Mr Pubbi worked for Your-Move.co.uk as a financial consultant from 26 May 2015. The tribunal accepted that he was disabled by reason of social phobia. The case concerned disability discrimination complaints about the 2017 appraisal process, a January 2018 conference call and email exchanges, an HR Google search in February 2018, and his dismissal after his bankruptcy was discovered. The tribunal also dealt with time-limit arguments, finding that most of the earlier allegations were out of time, although it still addressed them on the merits, and it allowed the Google-search issue to proceed because it was linked to the dismissal.

On the discrimination claims, the tribunal found that the respondent had already made adjustments to the claimant’s return to work after sickness absence. He was returned on a phased basis, spent three months on conversions rather than banked income, and then moved to an adjusted banked-income target. The tribunal held that the December 2017 appraisal rating of "improve performance" reflected the actual performance recorded against those adjusted targets, and that the reference to health and family issues showed that his circumstances had been taken into account rather than ignored. It also found that the later communication about redoing the appraisal had not been withdrawn in the way alleged, and that the conference-call complaint failed because the claimant could not identify the incident clearly and the questions he described were positive rather than hostile.

The tribunal rejected the complaints about the email exchanges and the HR search. It found that the claimant’s confrontational written language was not shown to arise from his disability, and there was no evidence that copying HR into emails was because of disability; the tribunal accepted the respondent’s explanation that HR was copied in because of the earlier deterioration in the working relationship and to keep an audit trail. It also found that the February 2018 Google search was not carried out because of the claimant’s disability or disability-related absence, and that the claimant had not shown any substantial disadvantage for the reasonable-adjustments case.

On dismissal, the tribunal accepted that the respondent was operating in a regulated financial-services environment and required ongoing fitness and propriety checks. It found that the claimant knew, from the documents he signed and from his experience in the sector, that relevant changes such as bankruptcy had to be disclosed. The tribunal held that the reason for dismissal was misconduct, namely failure to disclose bankruptcy, loss of authorisation with First Complete, and the resulting breakdown of trust and confidence. It found that the disciplinary and appeal process was fair overall, that the decision-makers were independent, that the claimant had a full opportunity to make representations including about mitigation and disability, and that dismissal fell within the band of reasonable responses. The grievance outcome was only partially upheld, with recommendations including an apology and a different manager for the appraisal, but that did not alter the dismissal outcome.