Mr Z Turek v We Insure Tech Limited and 2 others — 2021

The claimant was employed from 27 August 2019 as a Workshop Technical Assistant Engineer. The respondents operated a small repair business dealing with a large Envirofone contract and had significant stock-control problems. In February 2020 Envirofone terminated the contract from 1 March 2020, creating a redundancy situation, and the claimant's employment ended on 12 March 2020 after Mr Meek reviewed CCTV, believed he had found evidence of phones being removed, contacted the police, and summarily dismissed the claimant.

The tribunal found that Mr Meek genuinely believed the claimant had taken phones, based on the CCTV, the fact that the claimant mainly worked on DSR phones, and that he worked alone on Saturday mornings. However, the tribunal was not satisfied that the claimant actually stole the phones or committed gross misconduct. It rejected the respondents' interpretation of the CCTV, noted the poor state of the stock controls, and relied on the fact that the police searched the claimant's home and phone and found no evidence, after which they said they would not prosecute.

On race discrimination, the tribunal held that Mr Sanger and Mr Clark were not appropriate comparators because they were not filmed leaving the workshop with phones, did not work predominantly on DSRs, and did not work alone on Saturday mornings. It considered the appropriate comparator to be a hypothetical British employee in the same circumstances and found that such a comparator would also have been dismissed, reported to the police, had tools retained, had salary withheld, been asked to repay the phone losses, and been met with the same failure to deal with a grievance. The tribunal therefore dismissed the race discrimination complaint.

The breach of contract complaint succeeded because the claimant was entitled to one week's notice, and the tribunal awarded £413.50 before uplift. The unlawful deduction from wages claim also succeeded in the agreed sum of £682. The tribunal made no section 38 Employment Act 2002 award because it found a contract had been issued early in the employment, and it applied a 25% uplift under section 207A TULRCA 1992 because the ACAS Code had been unreasonably breached in relation to the dismissal, producing final awards of £516.88 and £852.50 respectively.