Mr D Hall v Wood Group Industrial Services Limited Heard: Remotely (by video link) — 2021

Mr Hall had worked for Wood Group Industrial Services Limited since 1998 and was Operations Director Construction UK. After the respondent decided to close its Construction Division in May 2018, he was given redundancy notice expiring on 16 September 2019, but he remained in post to complete the remaining HBV projects at Shiremoor, Blyth and Stanley. In January 2019 HBV wrote asking for his removal from the contract and alleging obstructive conduct and delay across the projects. The respondent suspended him and treated the matter as a disciplinary issue concerning conduct, not redundancy.

The tribunal accepted that the respondent was entitled to investigate the HBV complaint across all three sites, but held that the investigation carried out by Mr Ramsey was not reasonable. He ignored the claimant’s written responses of 27 February 2019, did not test the allegations against the claimant’s emails or files, and did not interview colleagues. Mr Foulkes then relied on that flawed investigation when he dismissed the claimant for gross misconduct on 19 March 2019. The claimant did not help his position by failing to engage properly with the process, including not attending or meaningfully engaging with the disciplinary hearing, but those failings did not make the investigation reasonable.

On appeal, Mr Lees carried out some further enquiries and overturned some of the specific allegations, including points about the plasterers, the lamppost and soil validation reports. However, the tribunal found it was outside the range of reasonable responses for him not to put the results of those enquiries back to Mr Hall for comment before deciding the appeal. The tribunal held that the reason for dismissal was misconduct and not some other substantial reason, and that the dismissal was unfair under section 98(4) ERA 1996 because of the defective investigation and appeal process.

For remedy purposes, the tribunal found there was a 50% chance that a fair procedure would still have led to dismissal, and it held that the claimant had contributed to his dismissal by culpable conduct. It said that any basic and compensatory award would be reduced by 50% for contributory fault. No final compensation figure was determined in this liability judgment, and the remedy issues were left to a later hearing.