Employment tribunal upholds part of claim by monitoring officer against council

An employment tribunal has upheld a former monitoring officer’s claim of victimisation and unfair dismissal by a borough council.

However, it rejected Karen Whitmore’s claims againt Middlesborough Council of harassment, and detriment on grounds of having made protected disclosures.

The local authority is reported to have spent almost £270,000 to defend itself.

A council spokesman said: “We will not be commenting on any aspects of the hearing – including costs – until the whole process is complete, and that is not yet the case.”

The Employment Tribunal's judgment said it was not disputed that Ms Whitmore, who had responsibility for the council's legal and human resources departments, had raised issues concerning her pay grade from 2013 onwards.

In November 2015 executive director of commercial and corporate services Tony Parkinson proposed the merger of Ms Whitmore’s post and that of the chief finance officer into a single post that required an accounting qualification that she did not possess.

Ms Whitmore raised objections to the legality of the council’s approach to the restructuring but in December 2015 formal redundancy consultation began.

In January 2016 Ms Whitmore wrote to the chief executive, external auditor Ernst and Young, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the council’s elected mayor Dave Budd to say that she thought the processes used were unlawful. Later in the month she was placed on home leave.

In March that year Ms Whitmore was given notice and told she would receive £35,213.

The tribunal held that the claimant had been victimised by being placed on home leave because she raised a grievance, a protected act.

The claim for unfair dismissal also succeeded, the tribunal said, because “the tragedy in this case is that Mr Parkinson’s approach led the claimant to conclude he was set on her dismissal, come what way, including his insistence to both councillors and the claimant that there was a legal green light for his actions”.

It said that meant there was little reasonable prospect of Ms Whitmore “making sensible contributions or analysis on the substance, or that there could be recovery from soured relationships”.

“All these matters considered, in the round, did the respondent act reasonably, that is within a band of reasonable responses, in treating the elimination of the posts as sufficient reason for the claimant’s dismissal, we consider it did not.”

The harassment allegation concerned a claim that chief executive Mike Robinson engaged “in unwanted conduct relating to the claimant’s sex with the purpose or effect of violating the claimant’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.

This included claims that he addressed a meeting that Ms Whitmore attended as “gentlemen” and indicated that he expected Ms Whitmore to object to a risqué joke about nuns he made at a work meeting - although Mr Robinson recalled the joke in fact concerned lawnmowers.

The tribunal found: “Mr Robinson had no intention to humiliate or cause offence", and Ms Whitmore had not made out that the unwanted conduct related to sex had the statutory effect at the time. The harassment complaints failed on merit.

The complaint about protected disclosures was meanwhile dismissed on the grounds that the material disclosed had not been in the public interest but was part of Ms Whitmore’s own dispute with the council.

An equal pay complaint against the council remains outstanding.

Mark Smulian