(sitting alone) Mrs J Lochhead v Thomas Bradley & Co Ltd — 2019

Mrs J Lochhead was employed by Thomas Bradley & Co Ltd as a business development manager from 3 March 2017 until her dismissal on 3 May 2018. She brought a claim that her dismissal was automatically unfair under section 104 ERA 1996 because it followed her assertion of the statutory right to a written statement of employment particulars. The tribunal held that her comments in December 2017 and her request on 8 March 2018 were enough to amount to an allegation that the statutory right had been infringed, but that this did not by itself establish liability.

The tribunal found that the respondent dismissed the claimant because it was dissatisfied with her output, in particular the number of client appointments she booked and the number of leads she generated, and because it considered she was not generating sufficient business to justify her salary. It accepted that Mr Ewart and Mr Bradley had reviewed her figures in March 2018, that the claimant did not generally achieve 55 points or five appointments per week, and that a disciplinary process followed. It also accepted that the claimant had been paid bonuses totalling £5,040 over the course of her employment despite not meeting the stated points thresholds.

The tribunal dismissed the claim. It concluded on the balance of probabilities that the claimant had not established that her dismissal was because she had asserted the right to written particulars, and it found that the relevant reason was performance-related concern about leads and appointments. The tribunal noted that the claimant had less than two years' service, so she could not bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim under section 94 ERA 1996, and it observed that it had reservations about whether the expected targets had been made sufficiently clear for such a claim, but that issue did not affect the outcome of the automatic unfair dismissal claim.