Employment

Unfair dismissal - misconduct - test of reasonableness applicable to disciplinary procedureWhitbread Plc (trading as Whitbread Medway Inns) v Hall: CA (Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss P, Mantell and Hale LJJ): 27 February 2001The applicant, while admitting the misconduct complained of, claimed unfair dismissal.The employment tribunal's finding that, although the dismissal had been within the range of responses open to a reasonable employer the disciplinary process had been so flawed as to render the dismissal unfair in that the complainant, the employee's immediate superior, had conducted the inquiry and had not considered any options other than dismissal, had been upheld by the Employment Appeal Tribunal.The employer appealed on the grounds that the requirement of reasonableness in section 98(4) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 related only to the outcome in terms of the penalty imposed and that it was not open to a tribunal to apply the 'band of reasonable responses' test to the process by which the employer had arrived at the decision.Simon Gorton (instructed by Weightmans, Birmingham) for the employer; Jane Sinclair (instructed by Hill Taylor Dickinson) for the employee.Held, dismissing the appeal, that the wording of section 98(4) of the 1996 Act which required a tribunal to determine 'in accordance with equity and the substantial merits of the case' whether the employer had acted reasonably, suggested that there were both substantive and procedural elements to that determination; and that, accordingly, it was open to the tribunal to consider whether the process by which the employer had arrived at that decision had been reasonable even where the misconduct had been admitted.