Whistleblowing
The Supreme Court has held that it was automatically unfair to dismiss an employee where the person who took the decision to dismiss was not aware that the employee had made protected disclosures and had been misled by the employee’s line manager, who knew of the disclosure and had engineered a dismissal for poor performance.
The Supreme Court agreed with the EAT and overturned the decision of the Court of Appeal, summarising the position by stating “if a person in the hierarchy of responsibility above the employee determines that she (or he) should be dismissed for a reason but hides it behind an invented reason which the decision-maker adopts, the reason for the dismissal is the hidden reason rather than the invented reason.”