An employment judge who created a hostile environment for the complainant in a hearing has been issued with formal advice for misconduct.
A complaint was made in 2022 to the president of the employment tribunals (England and Wales) over the manner in which employment judge Philip Lancaster had conducted a hearing.
Lancaster was alleged to have ‘displayed bias, shouted on multiple occasions, made hostile and inappropriate comments and repeatedly interrupted during cross examination’, a spokesperson for the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office said.
An investigation into the complaint was paused to wait for the outcome of an associated appeal. In 2025, three years after the original complaint, the deferral was lifted and the investigation resumed.
Lancaster said the hearing was ‘factually complex and…he considered it necessary to intervene on a large number of occasions to establish the contextual chronology’.
In his representations he said he could have handled the hearing differently and apologised ‘if he had appeared sharp’. Lancaster, who said he had been experiencing difficult personal circumstances at the time, denied he had shouted or exhibited any bias.
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The employment judge was found to have raised his voice on ‘several’ occasions ‘out of frustration’. He was also found to have interrupted the complainant during cross examination to an extent which was considered ‘inappropriate, and which created a hostile environment for the complainant’.
The lady chief justice, with the lord chancellor’s agreement, issued Lancaster, who had a 20-year unblemished conduct record as a judge, with formal advice.
