Member L Hutchison Tribunal Member N Quinn Ms C Jasper v Glasgow City Council — 2026

Ms Jasper, a domestic abuse advocacy worker, admitted accessing the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service Criminal Online Portal on 29 July 2024 to check a non-work case in which she had been cited as a witness. She knew that staff should access the external database only for their caseloads. A routine audit found the access, and Glasgow City Council suspended her before investigating and summarily dismissing her for misconduct on 19 September 2024. Her appeal was rejected in February 2025.

The tribunal dismissed the section 15 disability discrimination claim. It accepted that ADHD and Lupus were disabilities known to the Council and that dismissal was unfavourable treatment. Ms Jasper said impulsivity linked to ADHD and brain fog linked to Lupus had led to the access, but there was no medical evidence establishing that link. The tribunal could not find from her evidence alone that the conduct arose in consequence of either disability. It also held that, even if the required link had been proved, dismissal was a proportionate means of maintaining trust in staff compliance with the data-sharing agreement and guarding against the loss of portal access needed by ASSIST.

The direct race discrimination claim also failed. The tribunal did not uphold the alleged tutting, closer monitoring or failures to follow policy, while actions that did occur, including directing Ms Jasper to Ann Fehilly about diversity training and asking her to put concerns in writing, were not less favourable treatment. Employees who received warnings for accessing the Council's internal CareFirst system were not in materially the same circumstances because Ms Jasper had accessed an external database governed by a third-party agreement; the Council also produced cases in which white Scottish employees had been dismissed for data breaches. The tribunal found no facts from which race discrimination could be inferred and found that race played no part in the dismissal.

For victimisation, the tribunal accepted two protected acts: Ms Jasper's 2023 disability discrimination proceedings and her April 2024 complaint about alleged Islamophobia. Most of the alleged treatment either was not proved or was not a detriment. Suspension and dismissal were detriments, but the tribunal found they resulted from the unauthorised portal access, with no evidence that either protected act had influenced the decisions. The victimisation claim was dismissed.

The unfair dismissal claim was dismissed because the Council genuinely believed that Ms Jasper had committed misconduct, had reasonable grounds for that belief following a reasonable investigation, and imposed a sanction within the range of reasonable responses. Her admission established the unauthorised access. The tribunal accepted that the external data-sharing arrangement was important to ASSIST and that a breach risked the withdrawal of access. The decision-maker considered Ms Jasper's nine years of service but was not satisfied that she understood the possible consequences or that the conduct would not recur. Sparse disciplinary notes and the failure to feed correspondence with SCTS into the investigation caused concern, but the tribunal found no deliberate withholding and accepted that the Council could reasonably reach its decision under its own procedures without relying on SCTS's view. The delay in hearing the appeal did not alter the outcome.