Unfair Dismissal: Probation Service Employee Who Failed To Disclose A Child Protection Issue Was Fairly Dismissed

A Probation Service Officer was not unfairly dismissed after deliberately failing to give her employer full information about Social Services' concerns that she presented a risk to her daughter.

THE FACTS

An employee, known during litigation as "Q", was employed as a Probation Service Officer. Allegations were made (which she vehemently denied) that she had been violent towards her teenage daughter. Social services became involved, and Q's daughter was placed on a Child Protection Register. Social services advised Q to tell her employer about this, given the safeguarding implications for her job, but Q did not so. Social services raised the issue with the Probation Service, and this led to disciplinary proceedings. In not informing her employer, Q was found to have committed gross misconduct. Rather than being dismissed, Q was given a final written warning and demoted.

Sometime later, Q told H, a senior manager, that her daughter was no longer on the Child Protection Register and was no longer subject to a Child Protection Plan. However, following an altercation with her daughter, Q was visited by the police and social services and a new child protection plan was put in place. Q gave H some information about this, but did not tell him that her daughter was subject to a new child protection plan because of the risk that Q (rather than a third party, to whom Q had referred in her communications with H) allegedly posed to her daughter. When H discovered this, the disciplinary procedure was instituted and Q was dismissed for gross misconduct as she had failed to inform the Probation Service that the child protection plan was re-instated because of the risk allegedly posed to her by Q, and because of reputational issues for the Probation Service as a result of social services' statutory partnership with the Probation Service.

Q claimed that she had been unfairly dismissed. The Employment Tribunal rejected her claim, and Q appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT). Q's appeal was mainly concerned with the impact of Q's rights under Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention in the context of an unfair dismissal claim. Article 8 gives everyone the right to respect for their family and private life, home and correspondence, without interference by public authorities, except in certain circumstances. Q claimed that she should not have been dismissed for something in her personal life.

The EAT, referring to previous case law on Article 8 in the...