Suspended on full pay for 9 months then dismissed!

[sangie5952]

I wouldn't have advised on this anyway HB - there is a solicitor involved and if that is the case then they should be advising her. We simply don't have sufficient knowledge of the grounds of her claim - the solicitor does. From what is here, I can see no good grounds to appeal. She agreed that she had committed gross misconduct, there was an attempt to redeploy which was unsuccessful (unsurprisingly - a redeployment following an admission of gross misconduct is very unusual in the first instance). Her claim that she was ill-advised is nothing to do with the employer. She would need to take that up with the union.

 

Her recourse here is her solicitor - not this or any other forum. If the solicitor isn't representing her, then I am afraid that says quite a lot in itself. If it were such a slam dunk case, I can't see why they wouldn't have her as a client instead of leaving her on her own to draft an appeal on grounds she clearly doesn't understand.

[sangie5952]

Interesting reply, thank you Sangie.

 

HB

 

The answer comes too late given the dates involved. But to explain, I am always very uncomfortable about giving advice to a third party anyway, because they don't have all the facts. They are filtering information from someone else who may be wrong in the first place, For example, I know that the grievance policy does not say "within 5 working days" etc. I know this because they never do. They will say something like "normally" or "where possible". No local authority makes deadlines contractual! Similarly, there are jobs in local government for which flexitime is not suitable - we don't know if this was the case. There is no such thing as a "nervous breakdown" - she may have had mental health problems but that does not mean she was unfit to attend a disciplinary. The allegations are very complex and on the face of it, she admitted gross misconduct. Just because she says that she wasn't threatening doesn't mean she wasn't - and she agreed that she was! And then the whole list of counterclaims are difficult areas of law - discrimination fills volumes on its own.

 

She's seen a solicitor who has advised her - if we now gave advice, based on totally incomplete information, some of which we know for a fact is inaccurate, how do we do that without telling her something that may not be correct? If someone has plumped for a solicitor, they need to work with that person. If the solicitor has told her something and she wanted to get some opinion on what they had told her, that would be different. But we can't do the solicitors job for them based on no information, because we could damage that case that the solicitor says she has.