Disabled ex-Voisins employee to receive £2.5k discrimination compensation

Wednesday 10 March 2021

A disabled former Voisins employee is to receive £2,500 in discrimination compensation after a Tribunal ruled he was “pressured” into attending a 'welfare' meeting - which was actually to discuss a pay-off - while off sick.

The employee, who suffered mental health effects as a result of his disability, had been working for Voisins for several years when he resigned.

Following this, the employee submitted claims for unfair dismissal, wrongful dismissal and indirect discrimination on account of his disability to the Employment and Discrimination Tribunal. He also filed a claim for direct discrimination against store owner Gerald Voisin - this was the only one of those claims to succeed.

The formal Tribunal documents describe how his claim focused on a meeting in February 2020 when the employee was signed off from work. He had declined to attend a meeting with Mr Voisin and another employee, but Mr Voisin followed up by asking the employee to attend a "welfare" meeting with him only. Mr Voisin had recorded the meeting, which allowed the Tribunal to listen to it, and publish sections in their judgement. 

Having heard the recording, the Employment Tribunal's Deputy Chair, Advocate Ian Jones, rejected Mr Voisin’s assertion that the meeting was a “welfare meeting” and that the employee had been under no pressure to attend.

Pictured: The direct discrimination claim focused on a meeting that took place while the employee was signed off sick from work.

He noted that one of the first comments from Mr Voisin related to the employee having a panic attack, before noting that the employee hadn’t got “that much better over the last few months."

The employee then went on to explain what had happened before he was signed off to which Mr Voisin replied: “…you see I am almost coming to the view that its almost cruel on you, frankly, to expect you to come in and function normally when you’re not quite there, are you really?”

Later on in the conversation, Mr Voisin added: “From what I have been told, you haven’t been pressured to come back for 37.5 hours but there is a need for somebody to do the job, and I think you can appreciate that, I mean we got a new till system coming in, we’ve got a new app coming in and all of these things need quite intensive training and also our mystery shop scores have gone down significantly...” 

Advocate Jones said it was clear from the discussion that Mr Voisin had “little or no interest in discussing the issues or [the employee's] welfare with him”. 

Mr Voisin suggested the employee wanted a “pay off”, which was denied, and then started discussing, “options for going forward."

When the employee said he wanted to get back to work full-time, Mr Voisin asked when that would be, but the employee said he could not provide a definitive answer. Mr Voisin replied: “That’s the difficulty we have... we need to run a business and we’ve got things that need to be done...” 

According to Advocate Jones, the meeting then became a little more “antagonistic” with the employee saying Mr Voisin was not showing concern towards him.

He wrote that the Tribunal had “no doubt that the Meeting was not a welfare meeting." 

Pictured: The Employment Tribunal listened to a recording of the meeting between the employee and Voisins' owner, Gerald Voisin.

He described Mr Voisin’s decision to deal with the employee "his sickness absences and the problems/effect it was having on the business” as “poor” because the employee was signed-off from work and had already declined to attend a meeting with Mr Voisin and someone else, while he was off work.

While he noted there was nothing “sinister or underhand” about the meeting, Advocate Jones described the way it was instigated and conducted as a “serious error of judgment” on the part of Mr Voisin, adding that the fact Mr Voisin had decided to record it showed it was “at best out of the ordinary."

Advocate Jones concluded that the employee had been treated unfavourably by Mr Voisin as a result of his disability, which he said was “not only the operative reason for the meeting to take place but in fact the only reason it was taking place”.

“[The employee] was absent from work and had been absent for a significant percentage of the weeks and months preceding the Meeting,” he wrote. “This was why the Meeting was taking place (even on the account of Mr Voisin) and this was why Mr Voisin wanted to explore whether or not he could pay [the employee] off. The Tribunal finds that the unfavourable treatment arose as a consequence of [the employee's] disability.”

He went on to state that Mr Voisin had directly discriminated against the employee, noting the Tribunal was “surprised” Mr Voisin would have thought it could ever be appropriate to meet an employee, who is signed off as medically unfit to be at work, to discuss a pay-off.

Advocate Jones added that it was “folly” to have attempted to seek to pay off the employee rather than terminate his employment through recognised procedures and practices, describing Mr Voisin as having sought to “broker a deal as quickly as possible."

Pictured: Advocate Ian Jones, Deputy Chair of the Tribunal, found that Mr Voisin had sought to “broker a deal as quickly as possible”, rather than following established employment termination procedures.

In his conclusions, he noted the case was not in the “most severe category” of discrimination, adding that its main feature was the fact the employer had “put pressure on an employee to attend at work for a meeting while they were signed-off sick”, adding that an employer is required to wait until an employee becomes medically fit to attend work, even for a welfare meeting.

He ordered Voisins to pay the employee £2,500 in compensation for hurt and distress.

Meanwhile, the employee's claims for unfair and wrongful dismissal failed as he confirmed he didn’t want to resign but had done so over his ill health, following advice from his medical team and JACS. 

Advocate Jones also rejected an indirect discrimination claim, stating that Voisins had made “every effort” to accommodate him in other work and training meetings, which he found difficult to deal with.