- Welfare Rights Advice -
The Centre is one of the major providers of welfare rights advice and representation in Brighton & Hove. We specialise in particular in disability and habitual residence. Although we lost National Lottery support two years ago, we have two part-time welfare-rights workers, Shanti and Guisepina. We also train a number of volunteers who can also help you fill in a form or give advice. If you are having problems with your benefits then ring for an appointment.
Employment Rights Advice
We are the only Advice Agency in Brighton & Hove to provide employment rights advice. The Citizens Advice Bureau will provide basic advice but for anything which involves further work or representation then you need to take specialist advice. The obvious answer is to join a trade union because this guarantees you protection at work. We receive far more calls than we can handle and we are not funded for this work. Where it is possible to help you it is on a strict one-off basis. We will expect you to ensure than in future you are a member of a trade union.
We also provide, where possible, representation at employment tribunals. Because may claims are not easy and require considerable correspondence and often initial interim interlocutory hearings (Case Management Discussions or Rre-Hearing Reviews).
We cannot guarantee to be able to take on your case and we will expect you to be pro-active in e.g. obtaining witness statements. If we do agree to take on your case and represent you we will do it under a Conditional Fee Agreement, which means that of any compensation awarded, we will take 20% and in very complicated and drawn-out cases this will be up to 30%.
We have obtained compensation totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds for clients who have been unfairly treated. We also, in exceptional cases, will represent someone at an internal disciplinary or other hearing with an employer.
We have also taken four appeals to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, which a court of record equivalent to the High Court. We have won all four appeals and one of them, Lucas v Chichester Diocesan Housing Asssociation is listed by the charity Public Concern at Work as one of the 30 key Whistleblowing Cases in England and Wales. We have also successfully resisted 3 applications from employers seeking to appeal decisions of the employment tribunal.
Cases we have fought include:
Lucas –v- Chichester Diocesan Housing Association
Robin Lucas was employed by CDHA who in turn were agents for EB4U, a £50 million New Deal for Regeneration Project in East Brighton. She discovered financial irregularities and when she told her boss at CDHA, his only concern was that she might ‘wash our dirty linen’ in public. Shortly after her hours were reduced and then she was sacked for ‘poor performance’.
We therefore made a claim of unfair dismissal and detriment under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (popularly known as the Whistleblowing laws). Although we won most things at the employment tribunal (e.g. that she was an employee and not a worker), we lost the Whistleblowing claim because it was held that Ms Lucas had not acted in good faith. This was therefore appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal and Judge McMullen ruled that an allegation of bad faith had to be ‘cogent’ and that bad faith was an ‘unusual part of an employment relationship’. CDHA at this point settled out of court rather than face a new tribunal on outstanding matters.
Brighton & Hove Council under Ken Bodfish tried to brush our concerns at the way EB4U were behaving under the carpet. However with £50 at stake and worries expressed by all 3 opposition parties and the local Argus the Labour group was defeated by the other parties and an Scrutiny Panel Inquiry was set up.
Nee -v- Landmark Groundworks
Mr Nee was a building worker employed by a building company. He was summarily dismissed when the recession set in and the employer did their best to avoid paying redundancy pay. We took the employer to the Ashford Employment tribunal and won over £26,000 compensation.
Ross –v- Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project
Almost 50% of our clients come from the voluntary and charity sector. People are expected to put up with conditions and treatment such that they would never experience in the private sector. Mr Ross was a cook for 6 years at BUCFP and was subject to a number of malicious and unfounded complaints and harassment and bullying from the staff. When we originally offered to settle for the amount of the redundancy pay BUCFP didn’t even bother to respond. The organisation carried out no inquiry, failed to invite Mr Ross to a grievance hearing concerned with the bullying and then found that he was the bully! The organisation then tried to get our case struck out by the employment tribunal and wasted its money on hiring a barrister. After having had to withdraw its application during the hearing, BUCFP ended up having to hire solicitors, as had suggested all along and agreed compensation 150% higher than that which we had originally offered to settle at!
Brito –v- Compass Group UK & Ireland
Compass Group are large company with over 20,000 employees. They run a stall selling coffee etc. in the foyer of ASDA in Hollingbury. When Ms Brito became pregnant she was refused a chair to sit on or a reduction in her hours. When she went sick as a result her manager described her absence as ‘unauthorised’ even though it was clearly pregnancy-related. The manager phoned her ex-boyfriend and was told that she had gone away and wouldn’t be returning and on that basis she was sacked and a letter of dismissal was fabricated (doing the employer even more harm!).
Eventually, when Compass’s Human Resources department hired a solicitor they were informed that basically they had no case and that it was an automatically unfair dismissal. We settled before the hearing.
MacKay v Hanna t/a Blakes Newsagents
When Mr Hanna took over Hollingdean’s main Post Office, it took him just a week to get rid of a long-standing employee of over 20 years, Mrs MacKay. At tribunal he maintained that she had resigned but the Tribunal had no doubts as to who was telling the truth and it found that she had been unfairly dismissed.
During the course of the hearing we had to appeal a directions hearing to the Employment Appeal Tribunal, which we did successfully.
E Wise -v- Banks Optometrists
This is an instructive case on how one lie leads to another. Mrs Banks had worked for many years for an opticians based in Brixton. Unusually we took on a case in London and it was heard at the London South offices in Croydon. The optician decided that he wanted a younger person as a receptionist and so he told Mrs Wise that the shop was closing down but she would receive her notice pay in advance!
It was only when she applied for income support that she found the shop was not closed and the employer was claiming she had resigned!! Unfortunately for the employer Mrs Wise had discovered another employee was stealing cash from the shop and thinking this might be why it was closing wrote to her employer. Twice she mentioned the shop’s closure, but strangely enough the employer in his reply mentioned nothing about closing. He was, of course caught on the horns of a dilemma. Whatever he said might undermine any future tribunal hearing.
The tribunal itself had little problem in deciding who was telling the truth and over £12,000 was awarded for unfair dismissal and breach of the statutory dismissal procedures.
McDuff v Quintessence Fragrances Limited
Ms McDuff worked in a factory making fragrances. Because of the lack of ventilation she developed various allergies which prevented her worked at all. Instead of having a proper ventilation system, as the most basic health & safety requirements demand, the factory relied on opening its windows and doors! Surprise to say they settled for the amount we demanded.
Jones–v- Fairdean Lodge Residential Care Homes
Sometimes you have to be a detective too. Mrs Jones worked for a care home which closed. Instead of paying her her redundancy pay, the owner decided to lie and pretend that she had been offered other employment before her job finished. Unfortunately her employer was not very good at lying and as a general hint to any employers who are reading this, backdating a document is more difficult than it might appear on the surface.
Although her employer created a letter offering Ms Jones further employment she forgot to backdate the year! And then she compounded it by getting a relation to take the rap for it. Literally on the steps of the tribunal, the employer’s representative agreed to the compensation we had demanded. And because of their behaviour no allowance was made, as is normal, for the risk that one might not win.
We had had to conduct almost a forensic investigation of the documents in the case and when we discovered the same unusual spelling mistakes in two documents, both of which were supposed to have been written by different people, we knew we were home and dry.
Osmond v Brighton & Hove Council
This case started in 2005 and only finished in 2010. It concerned ‘rolled-up’ holiday pay. Employers often used to include, or so they said, holiday pay within a worker’s wages. And that is what Brighton & Hove Council did for its Care Workers employed by an agency they had set up, Care Crewe. The only problem was that they weren’t paying the additional holiday pay within the wage packet. As Council pay is set nationally by the NJC, this is easy to determine. We therefore took the case to the Tribunal but as the European Court of Justice had a similar case, Robinson v Steele waiting to be heard, the case was stayed for over a year. Eventually, when it did come to court, the Council conceded and paid out the necessary compensation.
However the Council had subsequently sent out a letter to its care workers telling them that they would now be paid for all holidays they took, at the time they took it. Which is legally correct. However in order to fund this they were now cutting their pay by the amount they were going to pay them. We therefore made a second application to the employment tribunal and when that was heard early in 2009 the Brighton employment tribunal found in our favour. The Council then appealed the decision to the Employment Appeal Tribunal. After having received a copy of our response the Council’s own barrister advised them to withdraw their appeal, which they did.
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These are just some of the cases which we have fought over the years. We also, but much more rarely, help people who want to go to Small Claims Court though we cannot again guarantee representation.
