Legal Advice for Whitworth Kitchens: Unfair Dismissal and Wrongful Dismissal Claims

Module Learning Outcomes Level 5

You are required to take part in an Individual activity involving a role-play meeting based on the case study set out below. You will have 15-20 minutes to present your findings, addressing the questions posed.  

You will be required to prepare for and participate in a meeting with the Managing Director of a Company to advise upon the Company’s legal position.

Explain and analyse the operation of national and European employment law and be able to apply this to problem situations in the Workplace.

In particular focus on the following when presenting your advice to the client.

• Your presentation and clarity of ideas based on yourresearch
• The manner and logic in which you present yourideas
• The ability to articulate the law in a practical manner which your client can
• Your individual contribution based on groupparticipation

Whitworth Kitchens (WK) is a company designing and manufacturing fitted and custom-made kitchen furniture operating from a Business Park in Derby. The company has 250 employees and has been operating for 15 years. You are a recently recruited HR Manager (you replaced the previous Personnel Manager, Jenny Johnson, who retired two months ago). The company has taken the opportunity of restructuring your predecessor’s role to give formal acknowledgement of the growing importance of HR.

When you arrived in your new job you discovered that there were few up to date policies and procedures for the management of human resources. Many decisions have been made by line managers with little or no clear guidance from the previous Personnel Manager, Jenny, who had concentrated on the line management of the small team of general administrative staff, rather than getting involved in human resource issues which have been left to line managers. There appears to have been no training on handling the difficult issues for line management. There is a formal disciplinary procedure and a formal grievance procedure which seems to have been downloaded without modification from an old Government department website several years previously.

You must advise the Managing Director, Barry Fryer, on what needs to be done in the following scenario:

The sales director, Josh Ingram, has informed you that he is worried about a problem with a member of staff. Nina Kegworth has been a receptionist/sales advisor for three years at the Nottingham retail showroom where customers come to buy their kitchen units. Customers come into the showroom with the dimensions of their kitchen and Nina’s job is to welcome them, input their requirements into the company’s computer system and give them an estimate of the cost of the design. She is paid £25,000 per year and her contract of employment states she is entitled to a notice period of four weeks. She has an unblemished record and good appraisal reports.

Last week it was Nina’s birthday and she went out for lunch with her sister. They each had a glass of wine with their meal. Shortly after Nina returned from lunch, two customers came into the showroom and asked her for a quotation for a new kitchen. When she tried to input their information and dimensions into the computer system, the computer ‘crashed’ and the screen went blank - at which point she started to swear loudly. The two customers were very offended and left the showroom, saying that they “would take their business elsewhere” and they told the showroom manager that they were surprised that a company such as Whitworth’s would employ someone who was “obviously drunk”, as they could smell wine around her, and they said that she had behaved “appallingly”.

Later that day Josh Ingram heard about this incident and he immediately asked Nina into his office. Nina said that she had had a ‘bad’ time that day with the computer, as the system had crashed several times, and she would not normally swear. She also said she was definitely not drunk and had only had one glass of wine with her lunch. Josh, however, felt that the company could not afford to lose customers in this way and decided he had to ‘let her go.’ He told Nina that she was summarily dismissed and asked her to collect her belongings immediately and leave the building.

Nina has now submitted unfair dismissal and wrongful dismissal claims to the Employment Tribunal, and the company has received the ET1 claim form.

Give your advice as to the legal issues involved and the strength and/or weaknesses of the company’s case.

A copy of the Company’s Disciplinary Procedure is set out at Appendix 1.

Advise the Company on the following issues:

1. What do you need to do to refute the claims of unfair and wrongful dismissal at the Tribunal?
2. Or, if you believe the company’s case to be weak, what you should do now to try to prevent the case going to Tribunal?
3. What steps could the Company take to mitigate these risks?
4. Advise on any alternative ways of resolving the matter.
5. Identify the lessons the Company can learn from this situation and any changes the Company should implement.