GRIEVANCES PROCEDURES

Shergold v Fieldway Medical Centre

EAT: Burton J (President), Mr G M Worthington and Mr A J Harris; 5 December 2005

The claimant, an audit clerk in a medical practice, gave notice of her intention to resign in a letter detailing complaints at the way she and her daughter, who also worked in the practice, had been treated by the practice manager. In response the employers held a meeting with the claimant to discuss the issues she had raised, but no agreement was reached and the claimant confirmed her resignation. In a claim for constructive unfair dismissal the claimant particularised two incidents which she said had given her no option but to resign, one of which had not, in terms, been set out in her resignation letter. In their response the employers denied that the claimant had raised the substance of her claim in writing under a grievance procedure and stated that they had not viewed her letter as a grievance but rather as a resignation. An employment tribunal dismissed the complaint on the ground that the claimant had failed to comply with section 32 of and paragraph 6 of Schedule 2 to the Employment Act 2002.

The claimant appealed.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal held:
Paragraph 6 of Schedule 2 to the Employment Act 2002 simply required an employee wishing to present a complaint to an employment tribunal to set out the grievance in writing to the employer, because otherwise the employer would not necessarily appreciate that there was a grievance to deal with, but the employee was not required to set it out in any technical detail, nor to make it plain when writing that the grievance procedure was being invoked, and it made no difference if the grievance was stated in the same letter as a notice of resignation. Although the grievance set out had to relate to the subsequent claim, the wording of the grievance and the case set out in the claim did not have to be anywhere near identical. Accordingly, even if neither of the two particular incidents relied on in the claim had been mentioned in the letter, the letter was a grievance in writing setting out the complaint, namely that the claimant could not continue in the light of the way she was treated by the practice manager, and satisfied the statutory requirement for standard procedure.

The appeal was allowed.

Appearances: Richard Hignett (Ashby Cohen) for the claimant; Louise Purcell, representative, (Irwin Mitchell) for the employers.