Mr A Walne v Royal Mail Group Limited — 2021

The claimant, an operational postal grade employee, had a degenerative back condition and was accepted to be disabled. The tribunal found that the respondent had been on notice of his disability since 2004 for the purposes of the organisational duty to make reasonable adjustments, even though his managers in June 2018 did not initially know and could not reasonably have been expected to know that he had a disability.

The tribunal found that the respondent applied a provision, criterion or practice requiring employees to drive any vehicle provided for their duties, and that this placed the claimant at a substantial disadvantage because some vehicles were liable to cause him pain and discomfort. It held that the respondent breached its duty to make reasonable adjustments by failing to provide a suitable replacement vehicle on 12 June 2018. The tribunal did not uphold the claimant's section 15 complaints, and did not uphold his further reasonable adjustments complaint about meeting times.

For constructive unfair dismissal, the tribunal rejected some alleged breaches, including the introduction of summer savings arrangements and an alleged breach of confidentiality. It found, however, that the failure to provide a suitable vehicle, the escalation from an informal management discussion to a fact-finding meeting, the lack of independence in the proposed investigation, and the pressure to attend while certified unfit amounted to fundamental breaches of the implied term of trust and confidence. Those breaches played a part in the claimant's resignation, and the respondent did not show a potentially fair reason for dismissal, so the unfair dismissal complaint succeeded. Remedy was left to a separate hearing.