Mrs N Taylor v Lanarkshire Health Board — 2025

Mrs Taylor was employed by Lanarkshire Health Board from 5 December 2006 and, from 2008, held a Band 4 Health Centre Administrator post. Her claim was for breach of contract, based on the Agenda for Change re-banding policy and related NHS documents, after four North West colleagues were successfully re-banded to Band 5 with effect from 1 June 2016. The tribunal accepted that the claimant's 2008 offer letter incorporated Agenda for Change terms and treated versions 4 and 5 of the re-banding policy as the relevant versions for the period in issue.

The tribunal held that paragraph 4.1.1 of the re-banding policy did not create a free-standing contractual right to re-banding whenever significant change occurred. It was part of a process for an application under the policy, and the claimant could have started her own application when she believed her role had changed. The tribunal did not accept that she had been contractually excluded from the North West application, and it found there was no term requiring the respondent to include her in another cohort's proforma or to apply that cohort's outcome to her automatically.

The tribunal also rejected the claimant's reliance on the later version 6 wording about managers considering whether a request should apply to other staff, because that version was introduced after her employment ended on 8 December 2023. It accepted Miss Thomson's evidence that the North West re-banding outcome was not applied more widely because it related to a period when the North West locality had lost an assistant operational support manager and the roles were not shown to be the same as those in the North East. The claimant's arguments based on the NHS Terms and Conditions Handbook and the NHS Job Evaluation Scheme were also rejected as not creating contractual rights of the kind she alleged.

The tribunal found that the claimant had not completed a successful re-banding application before her resignation, and that when her employment ended her contract still recorded her post as Band 4. It therefore held that she had not shown any breach of contract by the respondent and dismissed the claim.