Miss Linda Obasohan v William Hill Organization Limited — 2019

Miss Linda Obasohan was reinstated after an earlier disciplinary dismissal and then moved to the Brick Lane betting office. The tribunal rejected her case that she had made a protected disclosure on 20 March 2018 about cockroaches and loose electrical wires, but found that her email of 10 July 2018 about heat, fans, holes in the ceiling, tangled wires and a possible fire risk was a protected disclosure. It also found that the 25 May 2019 grievance was not a protected disclosure because it was concerned with her own working situation and was not reasonably believed to be in the public interest.

The tribunal then considered a series of alleged detriments said to follow from the protected disclosure, including complaints about training, transfer requests, the handling of her fit note, suspension, pay, grievance handling, rota allocations, redundancy scoring, pension auto-enrolment and later vacancies. It found that many of the alleged acts were not detriments at all, or were ordinary management responses to issues raised by the claimant. Where detriments were established, the tribunal was not satisfied that the 10 July 2018 disclosure was a material cause of them.

The tribunal found that the claimant’s suspension in August 2018 arose from her failure to attend meetings about her fit note, the tone of her messages, and her refusal to work a cover shift, not from the protected disclosure. It also found that the delay in the grievance and disciplinary process was explained by sickness absence, administrative confusion, annual leave, and the wider redundancy exercise, rather than by whistleblowing. Later complaints about the absence of detailed redundancy score information, the appeal timing, and the pension auto-enrolment issue were also rejected as whistleblowing detriments.

On the dismissal claim, the tribunal accepted that William Hill was engaged in a genuine national redundancy exercise following shop closures and that there was a reduction in the need for Customer Experience Managers. It held that the selection criteria were sufficiently objective and fair overall, that the claimant was fairly scored, and that the BPM values element did not render the process unfair. The tribunal also found that there was no suitable alternative employment available to the claimant at the relevant time and that the appeal delay did not make the dismissal unfair. All claims were dismissed and no compensation was awarded.