28 October 2011     We do not have to visit a mental institution to find the insane

Last week we heard the reporting of a leaked document by venture capitalist Adrian Beecroft which   proposed removing all rights to claim unfair dismissal, replacing it with a right to seek a redundancy payment.

Mr Beecroft argued that current employment protection laws addressed yesterday's problems and that even if it meant employers could sack staff simply because they did not like them, it was a price worth paying.

We would like to repeat that comment again ‘if it meant employers could sack staff simply because they did not like them, it was a price worth paying’. Thankfully an aid to Nick Clegg, Norman Lamb, supports our view that the comment was insane by describing the proposals as madness. Although another spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats said the report would not be published, and that it was neither an official report or officially commissioned, it does not distract from the fact that some are promoting such views.

The report went on to say "The rules both make it difficult to prove that someone deserves to be dismissed, and demand a process for doing so which is so lengthy and complex that it is hard to implement. This makes it too easy for employees to claim they have been unfairly treated and to gain significant compensation."

The reality is that Employment Tribunals are not like a court of law where guilt is based on factual evidence. In an Employment Tribunal the employer only has to base a dismissal on reasonable belief. So the employee is already on the back foot.

In the book ‘Employment Tribunal Claims’ Naomi Cunningham and Michael Reed say that awards in 2008/2009 the median award for unfair dismissal was £4,269. Do not let newspapers reports of awards in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions give you the wrong idea…they are rare and they are usually people who are on hundreds of thousands per year.

As the Director Tim Burton once said “One person's craziness is another person's reality.”