Mr I McDermid v Common Services Agency — 2020

The claimant was employed by the Common Services Agency as a Band 5 Information Analyst/Statistician from 30 November 2015 until 17 September 2019. The tribunal accepted that he was a competent, capable and talented employee, but found that his work remained commensurate with his Band 5 role. When Jacqueline Campbell was on maternity leave in 2015-16, the tribunal found that the claimant was asked to cover only some of her duties and that Martin O'Neill undertook the Band 6 aspects of her role, so the circumstances did not trigger an obligation to carry out a job evaluation under paragraph 6.33 of the Agenda for Change Handbook.

The claimant's 2019 complaints concerned the nature of his role, pay, work allocation, access to Scottish Renal Registry data, and the handling of MSk work. The tribunal found that the respondent responded to the claimant's emails and meetings, that the MSk work allocated to him was within his generic Band 5 job description, and that the refusal to continue the Scottish Renal Registry work was reasonable because progress on the work had been sporadic and it was not core work. It also found that removal of the claimant's access to the Renal Registry was done for data protection reasons after he no longer had active work there.

The tribunal rejected the claimant's reliance on alleged threats of disciplinary action and on the meeting of 31 July 2019 as a final straw. It held that reference to the conduct policy was reasonable in context, that the meeting was intended to resolve matters informally, and that the claimant's trust and confidence argument failed because there had been no prior breach and the meeting itself was innocuous. The claimant resigned on 19 August 2019 citing failure to address his concerns, fair pay and bullying, but the tribunal dismissed both the unfair constructive dismissal and breach of contract claims.